Plus a change . . .

from Richard Ostrofsky of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed) www.secthoughts.com quill@travel-net.com February, 2011 The world changes so quickly these days that it is easy to forget how slowly some things change. Reading up post-modern philosophy, as I was writing my first book, Sharing Realities, I was repeatedly struck by the extent to which French, German and English thought today was still preoccupied and shaped by issues that go back to the days of the French Revolution, if not to the Reformation, if not to the Roman Empire and its fall. Reading the news each morming, I'm struck repeatedly by the extent to which American foreign policy and global affairs are shaped by myths and events and conventions that go back hundred and thousands of years. For example, one powerful American myth is its attitude that history doesn't matter an attitude that goes back to colonial times the 18th century and even earlier when immigration to that portion of the new world, meant opportunity for religious and political experimentation, rapid accumulation of wealth, and a fresh start. (To Canadian settlers it meant something rather different a fact that partially explains some differences between the U.S. and Canadian societies today.) Similarly, French thinking is noticeably shaped by memories of the 30-years war and then of Louis XIV, when France was the hegemonic power in Europe. British thinking too is shaped my memories of the good old days of Empire in the time of Queen Victoria, if not to that nation's struggle for unity and autonomy in the days of good Queen Bess. The Russians are still struggling to maintain the hard-won centralization and unity achieved by Ivan the Terrible, and still playing catch-up ball with Western Europe as in the days of Peter the Great. The Chinese do not forget their humiliation at the hands of Western powers in the time of the Opium Wars, nor its own Empire at the Ming heyday when it could see no other real civilization than itself. One could go on and on this way, for every country in the world. All have their durable preoccupations, memories and myths. Anyone who thinks that history is a dead subject in this age of modern science and high technology doesn't understand, doesn't begin to understand, the world he's living in. And yet, I believe Americans are right on the whole that the peoples of the world would be better off if they could forget past glories and

grievances to focus more clearly on their current realities and material interests though they themselves are not doing so, and are mad to think this will happen because they want it to. The question I would raise here is this: How is it possible for certain features of our mental lives to be so durable given that knowledge, technology and society itself are changing so rapidly? Why do people cling so durably so stubbornly to their favorite myths, in the absence of supporting evidence, and indeed, with a good deal of evidence to the contrary? To answer these questions, I would begin by drawing a distinction between mere beliefs which express and are vulnerable to empirical observation, as against verities which are not. If I see a cat sleeping on my bed, I say that the cat is on my bed and believe that this is the case. If the cat wakes up and jumps down my belief is readily changed, and I will happily change my belief and say the contrary. But when Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_Venus) were published and verified, people could not immediately discard their beliefs in Ptolemaic astronomy for the reason that rotation of the sun around the Earth was more than just a belief. Rather, it was a full-fledged verity, in the sense that people's mental lives and allegiances and thus society itself depended on it being the case. Mere observation could not immediately alter the commitments and relationships involved. More generally, we might define a verity as a belief with structural significance a belief to which people's epistemologies, worldviews and existential commitments are pinned. With this definition, it is hardly surprising that we doubt reported facts and observations sooner than our verities. Thus, if Daniel Dennett, a skeptical thinker whom I greatly respect, were to report having witnessed the teleportation of a ball or the bending of a spoon by mental power alone, I would still sooner doubt Dennett's observations or his sanity than my belief in (what I understand to be) the relationship between physical and mental events. I am not so committed to these verities as to rule out the possibility that Dennett might be correct, but it would take many more such observations and reports to change my mind. With this distinction in hand, it becomes entirely understandable that verities change so slowly, and that people cling to their verities all the more ferociously in the teeth of rapid change. Verities change slowly because they are structural members of their social systems and of people's lives within those systems. Typically, they are also self-confirming: not only dependent on, but strongly reinforcing an epistemology and authority-structure which makes it easy to muster evidence and arguments in their favor, but very difficult (if not mortally dangerous) to muster arguments against. And such verities are needed all the more, not just as

security blankets but as reference points and pillars of sanity, when social systems are being challenged by technical innovations that cannot be rejected because wealth and power and life itself depend on them. From this perspective, the religious and political fundamentalisms of today are fully understandable, as were the witch hunts in Europe that coincided with the Rennaissance, the rise of science and modernity in general. The faster the world is changing, the more urgent it becomes that some things be kept the same. However obsolete and threadbare they've become.