Last year I wanted to be a physicist, last month a philosopher, last week a linguist, this week an historian. Which is why I'm none of them I suppose.
(We have fog outside now and all the mountains are shrouded in it. The baby is watching The Wiggles in the lounge room and so I'm blogging with abandon.)
I've read more books than I have watched television this week. Sometimes I find books with titles I like the sound of, and I read them like an automaton until I finish that book, whether or not I like it. A little bit Asperger's I know, but the nice symmetry of finishing a book makes me feel secure and in control. And anyhow, you learn heaps.
This week I've been forced to think about history, personal and collective, through a set of circumstances that reminded me of my own. One thing I've learned is that to some degree each person's understanding of history is distinct from everyone else's. Therere have been times in my past through which I viewed myself as a misunderstood heroine, a victim of circumstances out of my control or an overcomer of adversity. But other people, through those same set of historical circumstances, have a completely different perception of me, one in which I appear as a minor character and do not occupy the same role I though I was playing. Sometimes, to my shock and horror, I discover that I've unwittingly been someone's downfall, and even played the villain in the historical script of their life.
I've also been reading a book called Witch Hunters by P.G Maxwell-Stuart (Tempus 2005) which discusses the way collective consciousness creates realities on a mass scale through cultural and societal norms. It discusses the writings and philosophies of prominent witch hunters in various disciplines from doctors (Condrochi,) and judges (De Lancre,) to theologians (Del Rio,) and demonstrates just how logical witch-hunting seemed in the face of the limited knowledge medieval society had at their disposal. For a person in the middle-ages it was widely accepted as a truth that women by nature, were weaker than men and more prone to falling into 'sin,' being both "sexually rampant and morally frail." (I wonder if they ever stopped to consider that men needed to accomodate all that sexual rampantness for it to flourish so profusely in women in the first place.)
"What is more, women's bodies leaked, as was evidentfrom lactation and menstruation. This therefore meant that women's bodies were less contained than those of men, making the business of crossing their physical boundaries much easier."
Now if you live in a time where this is the pervasive conscious and unconscious psyche, how can you ever really transcend it? This was as real to them as global warming is to us today. If a man believes this is the truth about a woman, how does this affect how he interacts with her? And if a woman believes this is true also, then how does this affect how she interacts with her world? Everyone plays their part, because it's 'reality' and not to be questioned and people who do question societal realities, find themselves on the fringe of that said reality and subsequently suffer differing degrees of punitive treatment. This demonstrated to me, just how we not only invent our own individual histories, but how we incorporate them into the history of our time and therefore contribute to the making of it.
History is a subjective thing. Historians make decisions on who, where and what are important contributing factors to the shaping of history and so they exclude some information and include others. They define history through the eyes of their own time and culture and even when they work very hard not to do this, how can they ever really escape their own time and culture completely enough to ever see history truely objectively? This isn't a judgement, but a fact for anyone in almost any disciplines as is pretty common knowledge these days. Even in certain scientific realms.
So what I now understand, is that not only is my own history something of my own creation, Ibut 'm conspiring with the world around me to accept the widely held belief-systems of my culture and society as reality. This isn't a bad thing, it's a necessity for human survival.
I've also read an article in the March issue of Philosophy Now by Stephan Snaevarr (Don Quioxte and the Narrative Self,) that discusses the idea that we learn to define and understand our lives by applying narrative meaning to them. This also supported my new realisation of history.
All this is great news if you're a po-mo advocate because an exploration of history does seem to demonstrate the validity of ideas such as that; there is no reality except what we decide is a reality to substantiate and control our societies by; that each man's reality and understanding is as valid as the next person's; and that there are many competing narratives, none of which are more valid than the next. And it almost converted me to post-modernism!
Almost...
Because then I got to thinking about why we choose certain realities to exist within collectively. The first most obvious answer, is that we do it to make sure the human species survive.
Much like the penguin march where all the penguins treck to the mating ground together and huddle into each other in the cold to form a huge barrier so that even while some on the outskirts of their group might die of exposure, enough of them survive to promote the survival of their species, so humans do the same thing, only we use social rules to engage with each other to collaborate together on survival of the species.
And I cannot help believing that some of these rules are based on realities and truths that are not subjective as a post-modernist would argue, but are either external and universal laws, or are innate human survival mechanisms.
Love is a truth that cannot be removed from our human psyche because without it, we would begin to forget to look after each other, we would begin to destroy each other and therefore potentially threaten the survival of our own species.
Which is the underlying reason I hate Capitalism, because it promotes individualism that, although it professes to be based on the same assumption that external, or innate, truths of compassion and love promote the survival of the species, it simultaneously and illogically encourages people the whole time to go against this natural inclination of group or species survival, by giving us permission to disregard each other in the pursuit of personal gain. In my opinion this is nothing more than raw survival mode and doesn't contribute to the construction of a healthy society.
Who were the best post-modernist cultures? I would argue that they were the ones where communication was most primitive and less defined because understanding one another is based on common modes of complex and intricate communication systems, most effectively demonstrated in language, but if you begin to break these codes up and distort them so that there are nothing but competing understandings of reality alone and no real consensus of what reality is, then you threaten to break down social barriers. So is post-modern theory, by creating the end of history, sending us forward? Or could it be sending us backward? (Some earlier thoughts I have along these lines are in another post Notes on my Poem.)
Where does this leave me? It leaves me believing that there are many different perceptions on reality, which contribute to people being able to construct and shape history and their own lives to a large degree, but also believing there are still real and definable external and innate realities we need to acknowledge. I cannot overturn the social realities around me in my lifetime but I can contribute to changing them by resisting the parts that I consider immoral or unethical or that I consider not conducive to a healthy society. I do this by fighting from inside the social structure and not from outside it as an enemy. (At least not in this point of time.) I also need to come to terms with the idea that many of society's elements are in place to help me survive. It also confirms to me the notion that criticism in a society is a healthy and necessary thing.
I want to construct my own narrative with self and social awareness. In creating an understanding of my own philosophical, political and religious belief system, not distinct from the social and cultural system around me, but within in it, I have some control and don't have to feel so disempowered. When I first began this blog I used the term disempowered in a site feed, but I think the very writing of this blog has opened up my understanding to the fact that I'm not always as disempowered as I assume I am.
As part of my experiment with this web blog, I want to begin to develop my own metaphysical or religous understanding, taking from history but not being controlled by the dominant forces of religion. I want to begin to develop my own political ideal, and to define my own philosophical stance on things. I've done a good job starting that today...
Cheers
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