People are shaped by ideas

I want to talk to you about ideas.  Ideas don't spring miraculously Athena-like out of your head without rhyme or reason.  Rather they grow organically out of your imaginative metaphoric and embodied mind.  Ideas are the culmination of conscious and unconscious thought processes and they have discoverable and traceable origins.  Ideas can metaphorically be compared to plants, they have roots that can be traced back, they start as small seedlings which with care and the right environment will grow and develop, and they can be cross breed by taking cuttings from one plant and attaching to a new plant, and so on.  This book is interested in tracing the origins of ideas, and the how's and why's of their growth and development.

This topic is complex but not complicated and it will cross over considerable territory and fields of study.  This is not intended to be a definitive study of the topic but an introduction and survey of this multi-discipline field of investigation.  In making this presentation I will act more as an artisan wielding a wide brush than a thorough and detail oriented analyst.

Ideas are wonderful incredible things of delight, sweeter than honey and more intoxicating than wine.  Ideas are at the heart and source of all things.  Ideas are tools of the mind; they are keys to understand the making of humanly constructed reality.  They are like a compass that could guide us in our journey into the high country of the mystics, the prophets and all those who were instruments of the Divine in conveying the teachings, the wisdom and the knowledge of and from the Divine.   The Divine is the source of Infinite input that our finite mind, our tools, struggles to manifest into finite output.

I was trying to put together the ideas and information that I was reading and suddenly a phrase began to formulate and take shape.  This phrase became my Grail, my guiding star.  It rang with certainty and I knew it was a fundamental formulation of the true nature of human reality.  The phrase is: People shape, and are shaped by, ideas.  My life is about exploring and explaining the implications, the meaning, and the significance of that phrase.

Therefore we must always consider the ideas /tools/ beliefs /values, the world-views, the culture and time you were born into.  We grow up within a community and the values and beliefs of that community seem to be universal.  But they are not; those values and beliefs are only shared by members of the community.  Those communal values and beliefs are the foundation and the building blocks of what you, and I, come to believe.  You then shape that foundation and building block in the creative process, and out of it you could create a new work of art or intellect.

I believe that there is a price to pay for failing to consider and recognizing this shaped by and shaping process.  If you were to pretend that this is not true then those forces that shaped you will unconsciously bias and distort the ideas you hold and propound.  The result will be confusion and lack of clarity in your thinking, feeling and experience of life.  As I briefly demonstrated earlier in this introduction, sexism, racism, and religious fundamentalism is a result of this shaped by process, by failing to consider the possibility that the system of logic that we use can tool trap us into these concepts seemingly in the name of logical consistency.  You can deal with this bias and distortion by discovering and uncovering the ideas that have shaped you, thereby finding a way to compensate for their actual and potential distortive effects in your outlook and analysis of your reality and your environment.

As an example of this principle here is some biographic information about my shaping.  I was born in 1954 and raised as a Reform Jew in Levittown New York.  All during my childhood what interested and fascinated me were two realms of ideas and beliefs: the beliefs of theology and the ideas of sciences.  In the sciences I was especially fascinated by atomic theory.  It became a metaphoric construct that permeated my thinking.

I was electrified to discover that underlying everything that I could see was a view of the world made up of only four things, electrons, protons, neutrons and photons.  This was Niles Bohr's early solar system model of atoms, no hint of quantum theory had I encountered in my early reading.

Those four fundamental building blocks seem to hark back to the four elements of Air, Earth, Water, and Fire, of the ancient Greek philosophers, to interrelate the ancient philosophers systems to the modern scientific systems the set of correspondences could be as follows: Electrons could correspond to the element of Air, since they circle above the nucleus, Neutrons could correspond to Earth-the neutral grounding element, which leaves Protons to correspond to the element of water.  Lastly the element of Fire could correspond to the energy forces of the photons, which are released by the excitation of electrons.  And there was a 5^th element.  It was known by many spoken and unspoken names.  The fifth element is the guiding influence by which all things came to have Structure and Order.

As for my other fascination, theology, it grew out of my encounters with my neighbors.  My neighbors were Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox Catholics, and Protestant Christians.  I was a Reform Jew and thus knew that Judaism was divided into three branches, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform.  Orthodox was the traditional view based on the Hebrew Bible and the Rabbis collected writings contained in the Talmud.  Reform Judaism, which grew out of ideas formulated in 1800's, was the idea that there was objective understanding of the world and it was the province of the sciences to build up that understanding.  Having acknowledged the process of investigated truth, Judaism must conform to the conclusions of the scientific system.  (This was what I was understood as the foundation of Reform Judaism.)  Conservative Judaism grew out of the ideas formulated in the 1850's as a response to Reform Judaism.  Conservative Judaism believed that the teachings of the Rabbis was primary but could be complemented by the learning of the sciences.

I looked upon Roman Catholic's as Orthodox Judaism in Christian garb, i.e. that the Popes and the Bishops were like the Rabbis laying down the teachings of how to understand the Biblical text and how to apply the Biblical teachings to the questions of living in the world.  Greek Orthodoxy was some sort of geo-political split that occurred in the medieval times and thus the two groups, Western and Eastern Catholics, from that time forward went their own ways.  Protestantism was the invention of Martin Luther who said that an individual on his own just reading the Bible could decide how to live in accordance with the Biblical truths as that individual believed them.  Thus the individual could pass judgment on which of the Christian ‘Rabbis' (the Pope and the Bishops) teachings to accept or reject.  [All of the preceding is how in my youth I viewed Christianity.]

One last other aspect of my interest in theology.  I was fascinated by the elder theologies of western civilizations, especially, the religions of ancient Greece and Rome.  I read as much as I could find concerning the myths and legends of those Western Civilization's ancestral cultures.

So, I had the scientists (who I likened to Rabbis studying the Bible of the physical world), seven groups of living religious traditions (three Jewish groups and four Christian groups), and lastly there were the old religions of Greece and Rome, that Christianity replaced, all were trying to understand the world.  All were living in the same world.  Yet they were not sharing common ideas and beliefs about that world.  Now I knew that scientists were persecuted by Roman Catholics, I knew of the story of Galileo, and I also knew that Christians killed Jews, there was the Inquisition, the pogroms in Eastern Europe, the slaughtering of the Crusaders on their way to the Holy land, and of course the Nazi horrors.  Ideas and beliefs were important and people could even die as a result of their beliefs!  Yet, all these people lived in the same world.  Saw it with the same human eyes.  How could they live in the same world and yet reach such differing views of that same world?

And underlying all of this is four unseen particles that make up everything.  We are all a vast interconnected and interrelated world of atomic particles and the fields of force that they generate.  Which means that no one is seeing the world as it truly is.  No one sees a world of interconnected systems of atoms.  Those atoms were creating the light that enabled us to see.  We see photons bouncing off collections of atomic structures!  Somehow our brains take this sense data on the atomic level and piece together pictures of objects.  We believe we see trees, houses, cats, people, but what we see on some level is collections of atomic process.  What a confusing, fascinating and mysterious world we all live in.

And so, out of all of this I had a revelation.  An idea formed in my head and one day I spoke it.  That idea felt true.  It felt like pure truth.  It sounded so real that I couldn't doubt its truth.  I felt that this idea was the key to understanding how all these differing groups of people came to live in the same world yet believed such differing and contradictory things about the world.  It was the key to the source of humanly created structure and order.  The revelation was this: People shape, and are shaped by, ideas.

It works like this.  People are shaped by ideas: meaning as children we are taught ideas, which become beliefs and values.  This is the affect of the past on us; hence the phrase is in the past tense.  Our parents, our teachers, our Rabbis, our Popes, Bishops, Priests, etc, all teach us what they believe to be true, what they were taught to be true.  This is the ongoing tradition.  As children we take in those past ideas and beliefs without question and we accept them as our own.  Those formative ideas and beliefs come from our most trusted sources of life.  Upon this unquestioned set of ideas and beliefs we build our view of the world.  To repeat myself, as children we don't generally challenge our elders, our parents and teachers, and so we accept those ideas as being true.  Later we may feel the need to rebel and then we take on the differing beliefs for the sake of contrariness and opposition.  Even still, whether we accept or rebel against them or anything in between, these ideas and beliefs are formative and they work in our minds as if we are all given sunglasses, each made especially from these initial traditional set of beliefs. [[1]]  These early teachings, these traditional beliefs are the lenses crafted by parents, teachers, Scientists, Rabbis, Priests, etc.

It is important to realize that from the moment we develop the ability to learn a language we are incorporating our parents and teachers culture and worldview into ourselves.  From that moment we begin the process of acquiring our life long pair of sunglasses.  Each day as a child that we are taught and learn by example our culture's language, we continue to ‘grind the lenses of our sunglasses'.  And the process never ends.  With each new lesson we learn, from whatever source, we process that new idea and we adjust the lenses of our sunglasses.  These sunglasses shade all further sense data coming in, they give that sense data a tint, a Jewish tint, a Catholic tint, etc.

Thus we are all looking at the same world but we see it tinted by the ideas of our acquired ideas and beliefs.  That is the past tense ‘shaped by' part of my equation.  As we get older we start to think for ourselves, we question.  We can even formulate our own ideas.  We are then again in the process of tinkering with those glasses, making the lenses uniquely our own on the basis of our own original ideas.  The present tense aspect of the phrase represents this: ‘People shape ideas'.  Perhaps we have such good ideas that we convince others and thus those ideas became part of the formula of how to make the next generation's sunglasses.  And this process of the past and the present, of shaped by and shaping, has been going on since the beginning of human history.

We live in the world but only see it through the lenses of our beliefs and ideas.  We can never take off those glasses we can only adjust them.  We are therefore forever biased, biased by our beliefs.  We experience the world through the bias built into our sunglasses.  If we fail to realize this we will mistake and assume that the world we see through this bias of our sunglasses is as if it were a hypothetical ‘objective, non-personal-biased' world.  Through those glasses some see Jesus as the savior, some don't.  Some see only Teutonic blonde haired and blue-eyed Aryans as being humans, some don't.  Some believe that the only thing that is important is objects that can be measured, while others believe that some important objects are beyond measure.  Some believed the world was flat or that the Earth was the center of the universe.  As for that last idea it was later on in history of human quest for knowledge that our glasses were made to see the Earth as orbiting the sun.

It is most important to always recall that all of these people live in the same world, are taking in similar sense data, but what they do with that data changes the data.  What our sense took in never changed from person to person, only the varying differences of the sunglasses changed.  Hence they, we, all see and experience the world through our sunglasses.  Hence historically it was believed by some that the world was flat while others considered, and eventually the accepted view, that the world is round.  The difference in our experience is not the actual shape of the Earth but in our metaphoric and metaphysical sunglasses.

Therefore to understand human conceived of reality we have to understand this process of making these sunglasses, this process of being shaped by and shaping ideas.  If we don't realize this we will have the paradox of conflicting traditions all claiming to be true.  The paradox is gone once we accept that it is the ideas we believe that filter the sense data that is coming into us from the real world.  In a very real and practical effect and consequence, it is not through the process of seeing that we believe, but rather believing creates sight: ‘Believing is seeing'.

[1] ‘Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born--the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim insofar as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness...so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words, for actual things. ... Most people most of the time know only what comes through the reducing valve is consecrated as genuinely real by their local language.' Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, pg. 24.  ‘We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences.  ...We build up our language in terms of these analogues.  We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.' [ZMM, pg. 248-50]  The structure of language and the structure of the logic tools we use should be examined if we are to avoid a tool trap.  Aristotelian logic is ‘Yes and no...this or that...one or zero.  On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up.'[ZMM, pg. 320]  Now Pirsig states that there is logic beyond this two-term system.  ‘Because we're unaccustomed to it, we don't usually see that there's a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an un-recognized direction.  We don't even have a term for it, so I'll have to use the Japanese mu.  Mu means ‘no thing'.  Like ‘Quality' it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination.' [ZMM, pg. 320]  Now Pirsig didn't know it but in 1933 Alfred Korzybski developed a whole system of logic that grew out of recognizing that two-valued logic is not enough.  By adding this new system, this new tool we can avoid falling into the tool trap of only having A-logic.  Although Null-A-logic itself needs to be studied to avoid any potential tool traps it could give rise too.