Warren Ockrassa wrote:
I think what Kevin was intimating -- and definitely what I was thinking -- is that human nature, which wants things to be polar and simple, is rebelling against all these fuzzy logics.
I was saying that that's how people are. But I think that's cultural. People in other societies often aren't that way. And I don't think people were that way in modern western culture until 500 years ago. When the prevalent world-view was the Great Chain of being, there was no notion that truth and authority arose from the interaction of disagreeing parties. Whoever was on God's side was right and anybody who disagreed was evil. We hear that sort of thing again today, but I think it's based on fear, rather than ignorance of something better.
Physiologically we are not wired, possibly, to see the world in such ambiguous terms. It might cause a lot of discomfort. And it does seem to take some real mental effort.
I don't believe that. I think we are wired to accept a lot of fuzziness, but our culture conditions us to polarize things, a conditioning that was beneficial for a long time by leading to better decision-making.
Look how many people are uncomfortable with ambiguity. We even have special words for the needs we have: "closure", for instance. So maybe some of the tendency to see things in terms of polarities is based, more or less literally, in the gut.
"Closure" is an excellent example of an idea that is cultural, not hard-wired. I think if you asked a bunch of shrinks what actually works for people, you'd find that those who seek closure at the expense of processing or working through things. Our culture says "Get over it, move on" which to me clearly is cultural, not human nature.
Let me take a shot at saying this another way. I think we are wired to talk and think about things with categories. Over the centuries, we have been learning to use more categories. In medieval thinking, the truth was one category; everything else was false. In modern thinking, truth belongs to no single person or institution, authority emerges from the tension and feedback between pairs of competing categories. Today, we are recognizing that authority can emerge from many interactions among categories, but we are just beginning to develop the cognitive models and skills to use that notion.
Of course, this is oversimplified... and whenever we acknowledge that, we are recognizing that our systems of categorizing and modeling language, thought, behavior and so forth always fall short of our true human nature, whose fullness remains a mystery. Similarly, our knowledge of natural systems such as evolution remains incomplete, even though we can clearly see how competition and feedback are important components. The demagogue seizes on the incompleteness to say, "it's only a theory," as if incomplete knowledge were worthless -- medieval, single-category thinking!
Nick
_______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
