HOW LITTLE I KNEW

Strange to admit how little I knew of what I was suffering from during the mid to late 60’s into the mid 70s. A child of the 1940s and a 1950s teen, I entered my adulthood with an assured sense of the world, believing that reason could and would sort everything out and believing that there was a master plan somewhere in an imaginary heaven which we humans had only to discover and follow in order for us to achieve happiness and world peace. I don’t know how many times I said in my early years, “I sure wish I could die and know all the answers.”

Then, when the comfortable world I knew mysteriously crumbled in the 1960s and I “lost my way” (note how that assumes there was a way to follow), at first, I thought the world was crazy as I sank into drunkenness. But, coming out of alcohol abuse, I used the second step which says, “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” and I began to say that, no, it was not the world, it was only I who was crazy.

But, now, in reading the following passage in CONSILIENCE by E.O. Wilson, I see that I was struggling not with a crazy world or with a crazy self so much as with a mighty realignment of my neurological makeup caused by my coming face to face with a new understanding of reality, such as the following:

“Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment.... Enlightenment thinkers [me?] believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing.... Reality, they [postmodernists] propose is a state constructed by the mind, not perceived by it. In the most extravagant version of this constructivism, there is no ‘real’ reality, no objective truths external to mental activity, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups. Nor can ethics be firmly grounded, given that each society creates its own codes for the benefit of the same oppressive forces.”

I think “relativism” clearly states what I was dealing with in the 60s-70s. Interesting too, that as I read CONSILIENCE, some of its themes dovetailed with Kernan’s who I’m simultaneously reading. In Kernan’s IN PLATO’S CAVE, I came across the justification which I and many like me used as a rationalization for our opposition to old ideas about order and knowledge and our descents into what I thought of as a sort of personal hell:

“In some ways this was all the familiar bohemia of earlier times, the subculture of opposition that seems to be a permanent feature of modern, democratic, permissive, capitalist society. But now, hyped with drugs and amplified with sound, faces and voices spread everywhere by TV, bohemia went militant, attacking middle-class mores and undermining rationality by recommending extraordinary states of consciousness to the young. These revolts probably would not have come to much had not the civil rights movement in the South and the Vietnam War authenticated the distrust of authority at all levels and supported the radical position that a revolution was necessary to change things.” (Kernan, p.160)

It’s Kernan’s mention of an “extraordinary state of consciousness” that got my attention as I read the foregoing passage. For indeed that’s what I feel I’ve been through and am still in possession of—a different state of consciousness from so many of my fellow American citizens. I don’t have allegiances to the mundane things of the world, like nation or state or wealth or possessions or rigid ways of believing in or of “seeing” reality. I don’t have the allegiance to family as so many others of us “seem” to have. I don’t like pro sports much. I don’t fish or hunt. I read a lot and write my thoughts down. All of these things are to me a radical departure from what others seem to think is the norm. Of course, this “reading and writing” penchant may actually make me a reactionary rather than a man of the modern world—for isn’t literacy disappearing?

Well, there you go, eh?
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"Reality is a flowing. This does not mean that everything moves, changes, becomes. Science and common experience tell us that. It means that movement, change, becoming is everything that there is. There is nothing else; everything is movement, is change. The time that we ordinarily think about is not real time, but a picture of space." —Henri-Louis Bergson