Mystery
If there’s one thing in life I’m absolutely sure of, it’s how precious little we humans beings actually know. We can’t even quantify how little we know, but I’m willing to bet it’s somewhere between ridiculously little, and unbelievably cosmically little. Orders of magnitude of jack shit.
To me, this makes the unknown, a.k.a. mystery, the most central of all themes to human existence. We are essentially defined by our fundamental ignorance. So our real choice is simply this: we can live in a state of elaborate denial about the mystery, or we can try and learn to live with it. Learning to live with it means learning to fear it less.
There are two corollaries that I draw from this idea: “boundary conditions”, which is kind of an epistemological idea, and “pluralism” which is a social idea.
Let’s look at boundary conditions first. As humans we throw up a lot of ideas about how things in the universe work. Some of our subject matter is physical, some of it is about the human condition, some of it seeks to provide meaning to the events that happen in our lives.
I’d like to assert that most good ideas have boundary conditions. That means that the universe is a big enough place that there are states of existence where otherwise good ideas stop applying. An easy example of this is something like Newtonian physics, which is great at describing how objects that are about the same size as us work, but stops well at describing things that are much bigger or much smaller than us.
I’d extend the concept to suggest that boundary conditions apply to more ideas than you might think, in fact that it could very well apply to all ideas. (And in the grand tradition of “meta” I suppose boundary conditions should somehow apply to itself, although I’m not sure what that would mean).
It’s natural that people seeking to promote an idea would try to apply it as widely as possible. But I think that universal application of an idea, be it physical, social, economic, religious, moral and so forth will eventually hit a condition where it no longer makes sense. The fact that the boundary condition exists doesn’t make it a bad idea in itself. That’s just the way things work.
The second idea is pluralism. Basically this just means “more than one idea”. I endorse this as a social concept. I want to live in a society where not everyone needs to agree with each other about everything, and the goal of the society should not be to move to a state where everyone is harmonized around a single idea, but rather that the society can peacefully sustain itself with different (and sometimes competing) ideas.
Like a biological model in which a polyculture is stronger than a monoculture, a pluralistic society is better equipped to handle change. This is because all of the ideas that exist within it have, of course, boundary conditions, and as conditions change pluralism will allow the society to adapt to new conditions. In a monoculture, when conditions change the entire system fails.
Both of these corollary ideas exist within the recognition of the limits of human knowledge - they are attempts to manage existence in the face of mystery, instead of standing in denial of it.
