Debra’s article for this month begs the question of whether life needs to make sense. Without a doubt, most people question the meaning of life at some point in their lives. Childhood is a time of seeking answers to questions by asking them of parents and other adults. Children are typically satisfied with the answers adults provide. In general, what parents and other meaningful adults believe, children come to believe as well. That is, after all, how cultures maintain coherence from generation to generation.
“Sacred cows” remain sacred over time. The term, “sacred cow,” originated with the Hindus’ respect for cows as a sacred animal. In a very different way, the cattle barons of nineteenth-century life in the U.S. also considered cattle sacred, but not because they viewed cattle with any kind of spiritual reverence. The poet, Alexander Pope, is usually given credit for the saying, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” The idea is that children learn from their parents, who learned from their parents, and on back from generation to generation.
In “olden times,” the ”age of accountability” was thought to be 12. In preliterate societies, children were expected to be ready for adult work and reasoning by 12. As societies became more complex, the age of adulthood increased, first for males who needed to be prepared for the rigors of warfare, and later for women who needed to be ready for marriage and motherhood. As cultures increased in complexity, the age of adulthood increased again to about 18, depending on the culture. Perhaps because it signals the shift from childhood to adulthood, adolescence is a time when most people in most cultures ask the “Big Questions” about the meaning of life and essentially choose aspects that seem to have coherence for them.
A caveat is, of course, that what we believe as adults is highly influenced by what we have been exposed to in childhood and adolescence. If, for example, you grew up in a country where people have all agreed to drive on the right side of the road, you’ll find it a lot easier to drive on the right side of the road than to drive in a country where people drive on the left. That’s certainly true for me. My son, however, spent several years in Japan, and he is comfortable driving on either the left or on the right side of the road. In NLP terms, he has a larger and more complete map of the territory.
That is, in fact, the way civilizations advance. We (the people) develop increasingly accurate and more detailed maps. We don’t all increase the accuracy of our maps at the same rate, however, and differences in maps from individual to individual and from culture to culture cause problems. If we all navigated by the same map, we would all know where we all were all the time. No two people, however, have identical maps, and differences in maps from culture to culture differ radically. The best way to judge this for yourself is to think of the people with whom you most strongly disagree. What—exactly—do they believe you disagree with? Consider some of the current political differences in the U.S.: what to do about terrorism; what you think about and your feelings about race relations; immigration; legal status of abortion; bathroom use and other rights and privileges for the LGBT community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender); and pornography and a whole slew of sexual “stuff.”
The title of my blog is “Embrace Reality” because my sense is that those who want their maps to conform with reality do a better job of adapting to it than those who insist that “reality” change to match their maps. In the Middle Ages, for example, most people believed that the world was flat. Their belief didn’t make it so. Just because more of those who are living today know more about the Earth and the solar system now than our ancient ancestors doesn’t mean that we have all the answers yet. Human arrogance, however, leads us to believe that we know more than we actually do. In thinking we know, we lose curiosity. What’s even worse than the loss of curiosity is the arrogance that comes from a sense of certainty. Galileo was imprisoned for claiming that Earth was a globe. By now most people (humans) have seen enough pictures taken from space that most people have given up on the idea of a flat Earth.
We (all of us—no exceptions) need to ask the question, “What’s my evidence procedure?” for important aspects of life. If your “proof” is based on a publication more than a few years old, it needs to be checked. Even if the news isn’t especially good, we are better off when we know what is real. A good evidence procedure provides a glimpse into what’s real, but the best of evidence procedures developed so far are not complete. Galileo looked at the evidence and determined that the world was a globe. While that much is “real,” it isn’t complete. We (humans) have continued to gather evidence and have some sense of what Galileo left out. As for the rest of the cosmos, what we don’t know still exceeds what we (including the best astrophysicists) do know. The map is not the territory, nor can any map ever be the territory. Everything else is nonsense.