DO YOU SWEAR TO TELL THE TRUTH THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH SO HELP YOU GOD?
We are asked to swear to a God we do not believe in, to pledge our allegiance to a principle of truth we have abandoned long ago. In my book, The Selfish Gene Philosophy I suggest that many of the irrational beliefs currently held by the majority of Americans can be usefully attributed to a hitherto unrecognized idiosyncratic philosophy of life.
Idiosyncratic because as philosophies of life go, it is barely articulated, largely unconscious and certainly unexamined. If it is emblematic of anything, it is the quintessential unexamined life. And though it sometimes defers to the Jamesian notion of a pragmatic basis to truth, it tends to root itself on the slippery slope of emotional preference, which may be why people do not take the unconscious philosophy of the ordinary person seriously, other than to milk it as a statistical measurement of the degree to which the public sorely needs to be educated.
In contrast to that, however, what if we were to attempt to understand this anonymous and unstated view of the everyday world? What if, instead of being turned off by its blatant irrationality and lack of scientific credibility, we were to recognize that the philosophy people live their lives by perhaps counts far more, at least for them, than all the academic theories of everything rolled into one? What, then, might the hypothetical tenets of such an unconscious philosophy of life prove to be?
Well, if I could put a voice to it, it might say something no less wordly, surprising and platitudinous than this: it is better to feel good than bad. It is better to feel something than nothing. It is better to be in control than not in control. It is better to win at whatever game you are playing (or as Mel Brooks famously put it, “Winning is twice as good as losing”). It is better to feel powerful than powerless. To be admired than neglected. To be paid attention to than taken for granted. Right than wrong. Sure of yourself than anxious. Better to be healthy than sick, rich than poor, to get something for free rather than having to work for it. Better of course to be alive than dead, to live in a universe that, far from being indifferent, is fine tuned to human needs and perhaps most important, better to be gratified and gratified quickly rather than having to risk being frustrated somewhere down the line.
At the level of everyday survival, the selfish gene philosophy is a pragmatic theory of how best to fashion one’s way in the world. It is a theory, the core of which is not to arrive at some impersonal, measurable and testable theory of the world — but is designed to find a way to conduct oneself in a strictly selfish world for the sole purpose of gaining the greatest satisfaction. It is an attempt to concoct the best strategy for extracting from the immediate presenting world the most sustaining, promising, personal nutrients. There are obvious and notable exceptions to such a ubiquitous me-first philosophy: depressives who succumb to the cumulative sorrows of an oppressive existence; sadists who come to life only when instilling pain in others; idealists who struggle to transcend the constraints of the secular self; addicts who are devoured by their own appetites and so on. Still, by popular demand, especially in our age of post truth, selfish gene philosophy seems to be the theory of choice (for a much fuller explanation, see Alper The Selfish Gene Philosophy).
Yet, put this way, I think only a moment’s reflection shows there does not have to be a forced choice between a warm fuzzy world or a life-draining black hole of non-being. We do not have to carve up the world into what we think we want and what we fear lies underneath. We do not have to allow such an anxiety-born, impulse-ridden, philosophy to play such a dominant role in our lives. Instead, there can be a contextual way of being and living with room — and sometimes over the necessity for loss, disappointment, termination, relative powerlessness — as well as the pleasures of mastery, entertainment, gratification and predictable reward.
As a therapist one daily expects to see patients who display an almost phobic avoidance of intimacy, an increasing reliance on gamelike behavior and power transactions of every kind resulting in the atrophying of the creative self and the flourishing of addictive relating. In plain English this means patients, often against their judgement, crave the kind of quick relief from even the most complex psychic pain that only a pill — by numbing the senses — can offer tolerance for the ambiguities that almost always underlie serious feelings for another person is perhaps at an all time low. To an overwhelming extent, therapy is now viewed as little more than pharmacologically assisted symptom management.
Yet, as a therapist what I still find strange is how ordinary people continually fail to connect, how they misread, mistrust, struggle to outmaneuver, manipulate, control, dominate, ingratiate and distance themselves from one another in a never ceasing struggle for security and power. What I find even more strange is how cynically this is taken for granted, how unglamorous and uninteresting it is held to be.
Pragmatism
It wasn’t always this way. One hundred years ago, William James published Pragmatism, perhaps “the most famous book in American philosophy”. Its sequel The Meaning of Truth followed shortly thereafter. With exquisite care James parses the conditions that make for epistemological truth:
“Suppose I say to you, ‘The thing exists’ — is true or not? How can you tell? Not till my statement has developed its meaning farther is it determined as being true, false, or irrelevant to reality altogether. But if now you ask ‘what thing?’ and I reply ‘a desk’; if you ask ‘where?’ and I point to a place; if you ask ‘does it exist materially, or only in imagination?’ and I say ‘materially’; if moreover I say ‘I mean that desk’, and then grasp and shake a desk which you see just as I have described it, you are willing to call my statement true…”
“Can anyone suppose that the sleeping quality of truth would ever have been abstracted or have received a name, if truths had remained forever in that storage-vault of essential timeless ‘agreements’ and had never been embodied in any panting struggle of men’s live ideas for verification? Surely no more than the abstract property of fitting would have received a name, in our world there had been no backs or feet or gaps in walls to be actually fitted. Existential truth is incidental to the actual competition of opinions. Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualist, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits though no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no one has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article, and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction — worship.”
William James was a pluralist and he could imagine many worlds. He was far far ahead of his time. He could imagine many truths, but he could not imagine a post truth world, a world with no truth in it at all.
Now fast forward one hundred years to someone who could: Christopher Bollas is a world-renowned psychoanalyst. His new book Meaning and Melancholia Life in the Age of Bewilderment makes the powerful claim:
“We have changed.
“With the loss of a sense of meaning — the feeling that our lives can make a contribution — mourning has turned into melancholy. When we are melancolic we are angry over the losses we have suffered, and we unconsciously blame that which has apparently left us — We now feel abandoned by the humanist predicates of Western culture and the network of belief systems that seemed to offer a progressive vision of humanity, and we have turned our rages against social efficacy itself. This anger takes many forms, from a passive acceptance of all forms of corruption to right wing identifications with cynical enterprises and murderous solutions…”
What Would William James Say?
What would the William James of over one hundred years ago, if we could bring him back, say of today? I find it easy to imagine him marvelling at the march of technology at the branching of knowledge, the hegemony of the internet, the globalization of society. He could not help but be astonished by the two pillars of twentieth century physics — the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics — the cosmic microwave background, the triumph of the Big Bang model of the birth of the universe, the spectacular rise of precision cosmology. As the father of American psychology he would be proud of the achievements of neuroscience. But he would find little consolation in the blatant devolvement of contemporary pragmatism into commercialism and crass opportunism. He would note the “through and through” hollowness of modern philosophy. He would wonder at the impersonality of our epistemology, the stubborn eradication of any trace of humanity; the endless fascination with the space time of black holes. He would find much of our current worldview not so much scientific — as scientistic. Our description of nature would strike him as dessicated, thin; our reductionism as a deformation; and our glorious equations, howsoever mathematically consistent — as more deflationary than expansive.
The View From Behind the Couch
Can the psychologist, the psychotherapeutic point of view add anything to this picture? I think it can. For the psychotherapist the meaning of truth is not so much epistemological as contextual. And the context is the self. How does the self, the social self, the self that is presented to the world, match up with the inner self? To what extent does the false self which we all have (in D.W. Winnicott’s famous terminology) allow for the necessary incubation of the much more vulnerable true self? To that extent is the relationship of the outer, social self in alignment, is isomorphous with the inner self? To that extent do we experience the other, as well as ourselves, as authentic. From such a perspective, meaning is relational. It arises out of a context. It needs to be experienced. It does not exist before it is experienced, it can not be measured. It can not be reduced to statistics. It can derive from politics but it can not be politicized. It can be self-affirmative, but it can not (or should not) be self-serving in a lawyerly way. It can be culturally suppressed, as Christopher Bollas brilliantly shows but, so long as there is a life force, the search for meaning will continue.
Gerald Alper
Author
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient
Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality
His new book is:
God and Therapy
What We Believe When
No One is Watching
