Perspective
That which we most lack
Yes, I think I do. After reading a lot of overheated puffery about your new cook, you know what I’m craving? A little perspective. That’s it. I’d like some fresh, clear, well-seasoned perspective. Can you suggest a good wine to go with that? – Anton Ego (Ratatouille, 2007).
I have been noticing, at least for the past 7 years, that much is lacking in perspective. I dare say many do not even begin to conceive what that might mean in most contexts. The poverty of perspective is, after all, a subject of ignorance, and one can never know about what they do not know. Thankfully, you can know about what you did not know, but now do. And that is where you can discover how you were missing something so elemental. Only after feeling that multiple times do you then come to know: that is the essence of trying to further your understanding of complex phenomena.
To gain perspective is to perfect yourself, and to lose is to become more blinded than you were before. I would like to think it difficult to lose it, but alas the profile of many fanatics paint a more pessimistic picture for that.
At any point, there are many kinds of perspective, and they have many different consequences for thoughts and actions. A certain perspective may lend itself, for instance, to the conduct of evil if not paired with certain other ones, which would better calibrate it. That is the case for empathy, as one might observe. Lacking all other dots, empathy (or the discourse of empathy, in the case of hypocrisy) alone is the author to the infamous proverb: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
But why is that? Is empathy not a good thing?
Well, clearly empathy is good, all perspective is good. However, the good can often result in the bad, should it be lacking in certain further perspective. And, for empathy, one does often find that lacking perspective on history and the workings of the economy is the main issue underlying the propositions of empathy. It is only with skill that empathy can lead to virtuous results — which also works in reverse, for aimless knowledge is sterile.
Plugging themselves neatly on the lacking perspectives of history, culture and religion are prophetic in their exclusion or rejection of all that is not native. It is much more difficult to acquire these perspectives in any real sense. You might study habits, and gods, and rituals, and social values and much more — but that will not lead you to take any of that to heart. Should one take the study of kami to heart, for instance, they would surely convert from whatever previous faith they had into the Shinto religion — and were they not to do that, then the subject of study would remain somewhat distant. That is also the reason why there are atheist: because they have come to think that whatever religion they may have been raised in, simply makes no sense (or is, at least, dubious). And for that, religious people also can hardly understand this, since they only know what it is to have faith.
Converts are, of course, the exception, and that makes them so very interesting. Moving from one sincere belief to another (including in an out of atheism) is much grander a perspective than one whose views have never budged an inch. That is why there is such a rich perspective to be provided by atheists (who are, mostly, raised into some religion or another) and by people who have moved in or out of countries, ideologies and much more.
Taking the “ideologies” suggestion, we might observe there is even an expected perspective crescendo: “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain” (attributed to Churchill). Life itself, and time, is a crescendo of perspective — though death may not be. If not in the enterprise of understanding complex phenomena, we can, at the very least, climb the hill of understanding our own lives and that which lay around it.
At any rate, be it for these perspectives which I have outlined, for gender, symbolic interactions, status, ethics, morals, conflict, food or whatever else, there lies the incorruptible truth that gaining, adding, and evaluating perspectives is a crucial process for engaging with our lives and complex phenomena alike. The poverty of perspective provide for evil deeds, lies and ugliness — intended or not. And that is not to say all truth is relative — for it is not –, our understanding of reality is simply much too restraint.
