Getting Discomfortable with Subjectivity: Part 2

Read the first part of this post here.

Getting Discomfortable with Science

The ideology of science (which, full disclosure, happens to be one of my favourite ideologies) is based on the belief that we can observe and mathematically quantify our shared external reality in order to predict and control its patterns of cause and effect. When scientists make observations and measurements of consistent, repeatable causes and effects, it is considered evidence. And when this evidence is verified by a bunch of other scientists through their own experiments, it is then deemed a “fact” about the world we live in.

For example, every time scientists have checked so far, water has always frozen at a specific temperature they call zero degrees Celsius (or 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 273.15 Kelvins). This cause and effect has been observed, measured, and recorded so many times, by so many different people, that the ideology of science assumes it is a “fact”. Which means it will be true for every case of water freezing, past, present, and future. But the real power of a “fact” is that it can then be exploited as a technology. Now, whenever we want ice, for example, we can put water in a freezer at zero degrees Celsius, and voila.

I should note, however, despite the man-made ice cubes currently floating in my glass of Merlot, that we can’t actually measure every instance of water freezing everywhere all the time forever. Therefore the ideology of science, by its own admission, can’t actually prove that this “fact” is objectively true. In this way, scientific “knowledge” is always considered conditional. The scientific method is merely an ongoing attempt to get better and better at predicting cause and effect. But at any given time, so-called scientific “facts” can change or even be disproven outright if more convincing evidence is discovered. This epistemological modesty is one of my favourite aspects of the ideology of science. Ultimately science doesn’t claim to know anything with absolute objective certainty.

Nevertheless, science has succeeded in demonstrating that for the most part our shared external reality really does appear to operate in a consistent, almost elegant way, as if governed by immutable natural laws. And what’s more, by uncovering and mastering these laws, we have gained many tangible and incredible new powers. To put it simply, science works. Through science, we, as a species, have been able to increasingly guide our own fate and control our own reality with the help of medicine, power, motion, communication, and bombs that could destroy us all.

But despite these incredible achievements, science arguably has its limitations too. For example, there’s no way to know for certain that these “laws” we are observing actually exist. They could just be a ridiculous series of coincidences or temporary patterns in a universe that at its core is utterly inconsistent and batshit crazy. Any given scientific fact could also be part of a massive global conspiracy in which so-called “experts” conspire with the Illuminati to release false claims about, say, global warming, in order to like, ruin the oil industry or something. Or, each and every cause and effect we observe could, in fact, be occurring at the whim of an all-powerful God, one who could change or contradict these “laws” at any given moment in order to like, teach us a really elaborate lesson about hubris. Furthermore, some scientists themselves actually believe it is not only plausible but probable that science is merely measuring the arbitrary settings of a simulation we are all living in, existing only inside a powerful computer game played by a 13-year-old girl in the not-so-distant future. Or worse still, this could all just be a dream or hallucination in the mind of a single observer (you, apparently), rendering science nothing but your own personal fantasy.

I know most of these arguments aren’t particularly convincing or even all that damaging, but my point is merely that it is possible that the ideology of science is wrong. Though to be fair, most people aren’t actually questioning what science knows. The issue is really about what science doesn’t know. Science in effect rejects the validity of any so-called “knowledge” that falls below its ideological threshold for “evidence”. This is where science gets into trouble because, for better or worse, the vast majority of the world either outright rejects the ideology of science or at very least places it on a lower tier of importance to another ideology altogether.

Getting Discomfortable with Faith

Unlike science, the ideology of faith is based on the belief that some fundamental truths can be acquired through one’s own personal experience alone. Faith dictates that certain truths are based on what you feel is true deep inside, even if it lacks any physical or observable evidence. Basically, faith is the subjective belief that your subjective beliefs can, in fact, be objective. As you can see from this circular reasoning, faith and logic don’t always get along. But to its credit, the ideology of faith has, through various religious institutions, succeeded in bringing together massive groups of disparate people like never before, creating and toppling entire empires, influencing the political, moral, and judicial systems of most of the world, even today, and basically ruining sex for everyone.

To be fair, as you may have already noticed, whether we want to admit it or not, all of us are operating on an ideology of faith to some extent.

We have faith that the information we receive through our senses, like sight, touch, and telepathy, is indicative of an actual external reality and not some kind of illusion. And assuming that is true, we have faith that our brains are interpreting this sense information in a logical and consistent way that actually vaguely resembles that external reality. Furthermore, we have faith that our memories about this external reality from the past are also real and accurate and not implanted or invented. And so to be religious is just to add yet another leap of faith on top of all this that says, you know that feeling you have deep down inside that there’s just gotta be some higher power out there? Well, that feeling is, in and of itself, evidence that there actually is a higher power out there! This higher power usually takes the form of an almighty God who is said to have created us and our external reality, scientific laws included (or anyway whichever scientific laws don’t directly contradict that particular religion).

Whether we like it or not, I think all of us are naturally predisposed to have faith in faith. When we are born, from what I can recall, we initially see a bunch of weird blobs and blurry shapes that seem to represent something that is not us. Around 6 months old we develop object permanence, recognizing a continuity to what we see that suggests a consistent external reality, ruining all the surprise of the game peek-a-boo forever after. It is around this time that we naturally develop faith that the things we are seeing and the people we are interacting with are actually, you know, real. This innate childish form of faith in reality can’t even be considered a learned belief or ideology as yet. To a certain degree, faith must be natural — instinctual even.

This suggests that we owe our faith to a genetic mutation that helped one of our ancient ancestors stay alive, spreading to the rest of us over a million years of natural selection. Ironically, this means that our sense of faith, which is sometimes exploited to deny the theory of evolution, is probably a direct result of evolution itself. Whereas our belief in science, which gave birth to the theory of evolution, is not. Because science is not an instinct. It is just one of many ideologies that we humans have learned to adapt to thanks to our highly flexible brains. But in the same way, our highly flexible brains can imbue the natural instinct of faith with learned ideology as well, like religion.

For example, as children, once we ascertain that our parents are actually real, it’s just a matter of time before we do something they disapprove of, something they consider “bad”. This is when we discover how truly awful the feeling of shame is. I think this childhood discovery of the ideology of “badness” (which is basically just a precursor to morality and religion), sparks an unconscious fear deep down that we could do something so bad that our parents might reject or abandon us completely, which we naturally equate with death. This fear intensifies our increasingly ideological faith that what our elders tell is not only true but now also “good”. Further motivating us to follow their arbitrary rules or else we must be “bad”. Which leads to that unbearable feeling of shame once again.

As we grow up, this faith in the ideology of “good” and “bad” gradually evolves and expands beyond just the family to include, more or less, faith in the rules of our teachers, our preachers, our pundits, our culture, and our society at large. Basically faith in general consensus. This is how our instinctual faith in reality gets saddled with all kinds of learned ideology. Indoctrinating us into dubious man-made concepts like race, capitalism, law, and religion. All motivated by our powerful instinct to conform: shame. Ideology is born at the intersection of faith and shame, leading us to naturally mistake general consensus for reality. And when we have children of our own, the cycle starts all over again. It’s a feedback loop. A self-perpetuating ideological circle jerk.

On the bright side, these instincts provided us with the strong social bonds and shared ideologies we needed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years in cooperative groups. The downside is that these beliefs that hold us together aren’t as real as we think they are. We essentially traded truth for survival. And aside from some pesky philosophers, no one had reason to question this type of “knowledge” for the last two hundred thousand years. Beliefs based in faith and guarded by shame passed down culturally from generation to generation like one giant game of broken telephone, basically what Yuval Noah Harari would describe as “shared fictions”.

For new ideas to emerge, like Christianity, they actually had to start as a radical fringe, overcoming shame and boldly rejecting conformity in order to spread via subversive new stories about miracles. Which eventually gathered enough steam to grow into family traditions, which eventually grew into culture at large, which eventually turned into Roman fucking Law. Ironically, any rebellion against conformity, if successful enough, eventually reaches a tipping point where it becomes the dominant force of conformity itself.

And over the last thousand years or so, convincing stories began to spread about a new ideology, one that could perform many miracles of its own. Actually, this whole “science” thing didn’t seem that radical at first. Faith-based institutions like the Catholic Church even sponsored scientific research. That is until science began to uncover increasingly hard to ignore evidence that directly contradicted many of their basic faith-based beliefs, like the earth being the centre of the universe or red hair being the mark of the devil. Perhaps most startling of all though, science failed to find any evidence up to its ideological standards that supported a belief in God whatsoever.

In fact, according to Wikipedia (which is never wrong), until science came along, religion wasn’t even called “religion”. It was deemed so fundamentally “true” that it had no name at all — which is, of course, the epitome of unconscious ideology. And to further add insult to injury, science also began to bring radically different cultures with radically different faiths crashing together like never before through advancements in exploration, transportation, warfare, and later photography, radio, telephones, video, TV, the internet, and soon to arrive mind-melding. These incredible inventions helped fuel the popular explosion of the ideology of science, which in turn sent faith-based ideologies, like religion, scrambling to justify their own circular logic.

And so in the age of science — pretty much right now — the newly minted ideology of “religious” faith has been on the defensive. Asserting that not only is it possible to uncover objective truths from within ourselves, but certain truths can only be found from within. The idea is that God cannot be detected through either science or logic because he is supernatural, that is to say literally outside of nature. And so for us mortal beings trapped inside nature, internal faith is our only possible connection to God. Faith has thus been valourized as a kind of religious test. This clever ideological loophole means that you simply cannot apply the rigors of science to religious faith, because the logic of faith explicitly exempts itself from the logic of science. And it’s not hard to see why most people would buy into this. Not only does it protect their long-held cultural traditions, aka their identity, but it is essentially the same innate faith-based logic we all grew up using to make sense of the world anyway.

And so we have a stalemate on our hands, between faith and science. And also between all other ideologies. And all other religions. And also between Coke and Pepsi. And Dr. Pepper. And Root Beer, and Orange Crush, and Fanta, and Sprite, and 7-Up, and Cream Soda, and also Mountain Dew. Which is the best? It’s impossible to say. It’s all subjective.

Getting Discomfortable with the Ideology of Ideology

In our increasingly interconnected global village, the “shared fictions” that used to hold us together in small groups are now driving us apart on a global scale. Given that there is no definitive “right” ideology anyway, or soda preference for that matter, I think tolerance becomes more important than certainty. And so in the interest of increasing human connection and the open proliferation of ideas, I think all of our disparate ideologies, especially the ideologies of faith and science, have a duty to shake hands and make up.

For starters, to my fellow believers in the ideology of science, we can afford to embrace the fact that faith-based belief is not only a bigger part of our own lives than we’d like to admit, but a completely natural part of being human in general. That doesn’t mean you have to like it, but before you judge anyone for their faith, recognize that you can’t just switch off an instinct. This means you probably have a lot more blind faith lurking inside of you than you even realize. At best, we can accept this innate impulse and learn to manage it like any chronic condition. What’s more, I think we have to acknowledge — out loud, to other people — that it is at least possible that faith could be a conduit to a kind of personal knowledge that is inherently beyond the reach of science. If there is an all-powerful omniscient deity that created everything, it makes sense that she would have to be super natural, aka outside of our universe. And to expect proof of a supernatural being to show up under our microscopes is probably illogical. Furthermore, who says the universe couldn’t be big enough and weird enough to contain multiple, even contradictory objective truths all at once? At the end of the day, given that the ideology of science always wisely leaves room for a sliver of doubt about any given theory or “fact”, it is only right to conscientiously apply that same sliver of doubt to the ideology of science itself.

And to the believers of the ideology of faith, for your part, you can afford to embrace the very same principle that viewing all so-called “knowledge” with a healthy sliver of doubt more accurately reflects the subjectivity of human experience. Furthermore, assuming God is real, and your faith provides a direct, objective connection to God, I think you still have to admit that that connection — and any knowledge, power or teaching obtained therefrom — can only be true for you and you alone. There is no way for you to know what God’s relationship with anyone else is all about because you aren’t them and you certainly aren’t the supreme creator of everything (unless God is reading this right now, hiiiiiiii!). What’s more, there is nothing stopping God from having a completely different set of expectations, teachings, and rules for each and every individual person. The fact is, we humans simply cannot possibly fathom what is going through the omniscient mind of an all-powerful deity in regards to anything or anyone outside of perhaps ourselves. Even if your God were to insist that he is the one and only true savior, that would still only apply to you. He may well be your true saviour, but that in no way prevents other Gods from both existing and saving other people. Nor does it absolutely negate the possibility that other faiths, philosophies, or ideologies could be just as true and real for someone else as yours is for you.

Faith is great for uncovering personal truths. Faith only becomes problematic when you try to apply those personal truths universally to everyone, like a science.

Science, on the other hand, is great for discovering patterns about the universe that really do seem to be true for everyone. But science becomes problematic when it is used to deny the possibility of personal truths.

And while I’m all about uncovering personal truths, I’m still allied with science. It’s the ideology that makes the most sense to me right now based on my upbringing, my culture, and my life experiences. But I have to admit that other people have their own life experiences and those experiences are just as valid as mine. Other people’s opinions have just as much subjective weight as my own, even if I vehemently disagree with them. It’s about respecting the fact that people will naturally have different viewpoints based on their circumstances, their upbringing, and their culture. In the service of bringing people together, we need to acknowledge that we all have just as much right to our opinions as anyone else.

It’s ironic that my own liberal culture is ideologically inclined to embrace diversity in all things, except ideology itself. I think this is a hypocritical blind spot that holds us back from truly connecting with everyone. To evolve, I think we need to resist the growing popularity of smackdown culture. One that relishes ideological certainty, fuelling endless internet flame wars, scathing editorial takedowns, and late-night political roasts (even though, admittedly, I enjoy and emulate them as much as anyone else). The dismissive, sardonic rants and opening monologues that dominate our facebook feeds aren’t really communication at all if they don’t actually influence or even reach the groups they are criticizing. We are merely preaching to the choir. At best bringing people together who are already together. Which is just another ideological circle-jerk, a faith-based feedback loop protected by shame. And though I have definitely been guilty of all of this, the degree to which we scoff, laugh, and mock the “preposterous” perspectives of the other, is the degree to which we betray our own ignorance about the vast multitude of different belief systems in the world, each subjectively as legitimate as our own.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a call for passivity or neutrality. This just about how we communicate. When we are confronted with a situation that requires immediate action, of course we are still going to follow our gut. When it comes to voting, of course we are still going to support our values. When it comes to law, of course we are still going to argue for what we think is right. When it comes to science, of course we are still going to trust the experts. But in our day-to-day exchanges, I think we can all strive to be way more open. In our conversations, on social media, in our reading habits, our media intake, our travel, in our schools and our offices, in all those little low-level moments of human interaction that actually help to shape and sharpen our beliefs, that is where we can all benefit from embracing the ideology of ideology. We can admit that all of our opinions and beliefs, scientific, religious, political, or otherwise, are all inherently subjective. And therefore could be wrong or could just be true for us and us alone.

I strongly, personally, ideologically believe that embracing subjectivity is the best way to communicate. The best way to be heard. The best way to learn. And the best way to teach. Remember that shaming people doesn’t actually help convince them of anything. If you really want to persuade someone that you are right, start by admitting that they could be right too. This will open you both up to a much more fair, composed, and intelligent debate. One in which some new ideas might actually get through to both of you. Because at the end of the day, it’s not really about who’s right or wrong. It’s about bringing us all together through shared understanding, so that we can all discover that we are all the same.

Except people who like Dr. Pepper. Those people are crazy.