Of Pendulums and Progress

We live in a world of uncertainty. We're never quite sure what's going to happen when we open our doors in the morning. And that's why we cling so tightly to things that seem like known quantities, sure things, done deals. And yet, underlying all this is the knowledge that there really is no certainty about anything. There's nothing we have that can't be swept away on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday.

The world itself can change on a dime as random influences swirl and converge around us. There are two ways of coping with this: you can either build a rigid structure of understanding around you, shoehorning everything you believe into one immutable sense of Truth, or you can accept that you don't know everything and forge an adaptable mindset.

There seems to be more sense in the latter, at least for me. There's a strength that comes from accepting that there are things that you don't know. When you think about it, many of the great institutions we have are based on that principle. Take the United States itself, for instance... it's explicitly worked into the government that anything up through and including the Constitution itself can be amended and changed as the times call for it.

The smartest thing the Founding Fathers did was admit that they weren't smart enough to know everything. They knew they were striking out into new territory, and where they believed monarchy had failed them. They dove back into history, looking to past democracies like the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, wedding it to their secular Masonic beliefs and imagery, and crafting something entirely new -- a self-aware democracy that could adapt to meet whatever undreamt-of situations the future could throw at it.

Recently, I heard someone in an interview talking about the frustrating, never-ending push and pull of our government's process. It seems that every few years we enact some new legislation that is immediately opposed on multiple judicial levels. This new legislation sometimes gets overturned, only to be introduced again, over and over, until it either finally gets through or fades into obscurity. I've been frustrated about this in the past, too. It seems like no-brainer advances are always met by those who don't want change, fear it or fear the often-imaginary "slippery slope" that it will inevitably lead to.

The point that this interviewer brought up was really enlightening... he said that the interminable back and forth was *the* *very* *point* that the Founding Fathers meant to build into their new government. They meant for there to be debate, trial and error, not too much power falling into anyone's hands. The pendulum is designed to swing, but eventually tend toward the will of the people. That actually made me feel better about the state of our current government… until I realized there's a caveat to the whole thing.

This ongoing debate, and eventual settling of things on the right path, works as long as everyone goes into it with good intentions and a spirit of compromise. The sad fact is that there are factions in our government today who are not entering the process in this manner.

Who are these people? They are the ones who are beholden to their own personal Truth. They base their political decisions on the contention that they hold the moral and ethical high ground and are unwilling to budge their position, even if the majority of people think otherwise. Usually, this unwillingness takes the form of holding back progressive legislation, expansion of human rights, dealing with climate change, etc. Some of these paradigm shifts are costly but necessary, such as moving away from reliance on fossil fuels. But the backers of these political figures usually owe their livelihood (and often, multi-generational fortunes) to the old infrastructure.

At its root, this disruption of the intended use of representational democracy stems from the belief that only a small group has the insight into what is true, and what the destiny of the country should be. Often, this consists of rolling back the expansion of rights to people who truly need them, strengthening the bastions of what has propelled us forward in the past, regardless of how the world is changing around us.

Look, I understand the attraction of a belief system that says that everything will be fine. Here's what is true, it says, it's been true since the beginning of time, and it always will be. But that's not how anything in the Universe works. Everything is in a stage of either growth or decay, and that's as true of ethics as it is of planetary systems. The natural state of everything, like it or not, is to be in flux, to be changing from one thing into another. Survival means accepting and incorporating the randomness of life.

For an example of how these two ideologies are butting heads, take a look at climate change. Here are two opposing sides, the scientific community, who has reached a consensus that global temperatures are rising and that human activity is responsible, and political conservatives, who claim that there isn't a consensus and that more studies need to be done.

This is where the scientific method has trouble. Its beauty lies in that it is, by definition, accepting of change. If someone came along with one proven instance where gravity works differently than we always thought it did, we'd have to set aside the old ideas of Newton and Einstein and modify our thinking, with a hearty "thank you" to the mind that corrected our errant path. This is true of any part of objective science.

The trouble comes in because of the very constant of uncertainty that makes it so noble. If someone who doesn't want climate change to be true comes along and says, "Are you 100% sure that we're responsible for it?" a scientist would have to say "no". Which would lead to the naysayer to state, "Well, then let's not change anything we're doing, then! How can we make informed decisions when we don't have *all* the facts?"

But the truth is that we'll *never* have all the facts, not until what is predicted actually happens. And there will *always* be a few people who think they know better than everyone else -- not that it's impossible for some against-the-grain eccentric to be right once in a while, but that just proves my point. It's not physically or ideologically possible for us to have an iron-clad scientific certainty of anything. That is what has led us to all the scientific achievements we've made, from the quantum tunneling in your smart phone to the software in GPS systems that accounts for the warping of spacetime. If we believed that we knew everything there was to know, we could dust off our hands and kick back until the end of time.

This is the war that's being silently (and sometimes not-so-silently) waged in our country today... between those who understand that we don't know everything and those who can't accept that. Unfortunately, the latter group tends to fall into two factions... the heads of large corporations whose livelihoods and legacies depend on keeping the status quo of pulling energy out of the ground, and religious zealots who believe that either God will intervene before we destroy the world or that we're in the End of Days anyway.

These two groups, the most vocal (and therefore most powerful) in politics today are up against scientists, who in general would rather be left to make their discoveries rather than brave the Beltway to state their case.

So these are the forces at play in this push-and-pull designed by our political forefathers... a softspoken band of liberal thinkers, questioning old ways, exploring the fringes of reality and the consequences of our actions on Nature (and vice versa); and a raucous tribe of why-fix-what's-not-yet-broken conservatives whose monetary and spiritual livelihoods are dependent on certain things being true, even if the evidence is to the contrary.

In a battle like this, who can win? And even if the eternally-swinging political pendulum can continue to usher us toward a more responsible, workable world, will it swing fast enough? No matter what the answers to these questions are, the reality is that we, ironically, have to lose our love of finding ultimate answers. We need to stop determining what we think is true before we see the evidence.

It may seem scary to step back and question what you've always believed is true. But it has to be done, in order to move things forward. One of my favorite people, Neil de Grasse Tyson, recently said something that might help ease the transition. When asked what to do when faced with the inherent ambiguity of the scientific process, when you're faced with questions that you know you're never going to find the ultimate, final answer to, he said "You must learn to love the questions themselves."

I'd go Neil one step further, with my own interpretation of what I think he's saying... you need to love the process of learning more than what the answer is going to get you in the end. It's the only way to stay on the path to the Truth.

The Heroes We Choose

I know it's hardly a new bit of psychological insight, but you can tell a lot about a culture by the stories it tells. Right now, the most interesting part of Western pop culture is the evolution of the superhero, particularly the way it's been moving toward the rise of the antihero (see: Tony Soprano, Walter White, etc.). I could go on about that subject, and probably will at some point, but right now I want to take a look at the heroes themselves.

Our culture is entering a unique position where superheroes are omnipresent, and at the same time we're struggling to find our place in a changing world. Superman has always stood for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way", but the definition of all three of those things has started getting fuzzy around the edges. That's why our superheroes have been getting more internally conflicted. At the same time, there's also a need to amp up the excitement surrounding any one particular hero, and this usually comes in the form of greater and greater superpowers -- it's the easiest way to cut through the noise and grab people's attention.

But when a hero's power makes him more and more invulnerable, the conflict similarly has to be increasingly internalized. This thought came to my head when I recently watched Star Trek: Into Darkness. While the experience was enjoyable at the time, I was surprised at how soon the buzz went away. It got me thinking about how "genre fiction" -- and by that I mean everything from sci-fi to fantasy to superheroes -- doesn't really work unless the struggle has some sort of metaphorical aspect to it along with the cool powers and amazing technology.

The thing that was revolutionary about the original Star Trek show was that Gene Roddenberry created little morality plays in each episode. In a 23rd century where racism, class, poverty, and war had been abolished, the alien cultures that the Enterprise crew encountered all obliquely reflected the struggles that Earth of the 1960s was going through.

But there was nothing like that in Into Darkness. The villain, a genetically manipulated human named Khan, lightly skipped around the whole prospect of eugenics ethics that the original series (and subsequent movie) put front and center, and he became merely a pawn in the real villain's plan. Not only that, but most of the fun of the movie seemed designed to be the "ooh, that's different than the original!" game. That's why I think Into Darkness will eventually be regarded as a "good" Trek movie, not a "great" one.

But like I said, it got me thinking... how does this power-vs.-morality idea find its balance? When does it work, and when does it fail? Here are the first four heroes I could think of with near-God-like powers, and how successfully they've all fared:

1. In the most recent Superman film, Man of Steel, director Zack Snyder flipped the script on us: we were given a hero with no weaknesses meeting with moral challenges that most audiences believed that he failed (which, after all is said and done, was maybe the point). Superman used to represent the American ideal, strong to the point of dominating. I'm sure Snyder thought that, in an era where we're questioning America's place in an increasingly egalitarian world, this unsurety about whether we still are (or should be) perpetually on top should be reflected. Clearly, America wasn't ready for such a drastic reinvention of its most enduring avatar.

2. Wolverine (from X-Men): While not having powers as god-like as the others on this list, Wolverine is pretty close to indestructible (remember that his only real superpower is that his body can heal incredibly fast... the addition of his adamantine skeleton and retractable claws are only a scientific exploitation of that), but he has a lot of angst. He's looking for his place in the world, and in this way is like all the other X-men... he's a man, but just different enough to feel like an outsider. This superpower-as-otherness has been used as a metaphor for civil rights, gay rights, and variously as whatever social group is working its way to acceptance in mainstream society (if that term even means anything anymore). This is why it works so well. And now that there are seven movies featuring the character, it's clear that the public identifies with him in some deep way.

3. Neo (from The Matrix): I think everyone agrees that once Neo mastered his powers inside the Matrix, the movie franchise lost its appeal. And it's true: there's no dramatic tension if a hero has basically no limitation on his powers. As time wore on in the trilogy, the only way to make things interesting was to give him more and more powerful (or numerous) adversaries, and think up new ways to delay him while his slightly-less-powerful friends were in danger. It was actually really interesting to observe how moviegoers saw themselves in him when he had a little power, and were almost completely alienated from him when he got a lot.

4. Dr. Manhattan: In the Watchman graphic novel and film (ironically, which was also directed by Zack Snyder), this is a hero who used to be human, but was torn apart by a nuclear blast. He somehow managed to reconstruct himself, and reappeared as a bald, blue humanoid with complete control over time and space. He exists in all moments at once, and can be in multiple places at once (much to the frustration of his girlfriend), but has lost his essential humanity in translation. He's entirely disconnected from earthly life, although he tries to approximate it because he dimly remembers who he used to be. When he's not creating amazing new technologies in his lab, he's endlessly (and often randomly) wandering the Universe, contemplating his existence. He wants to engage with us, but it's like one of us trying to live among ants. In terms of character, there's actually an improvement in the film adaptation, where he sacrifices himself for the good of humanity, (although only figuratively because he's immortal).

With all these characters, as the power embodied in an individual ramps up, the importance of their moral decisions has to do the same, or else there's an imbalance. If popularity with the American public can be an accurate barometer, Wolverine and Dr. Manhattan have got it right, where Neo and Superman (at least in his current incarnation) have not.

It's an old story... the fantastical heroes and villains we see on our screens and read in our literature reflect what we respectively see and fear in ourselves. In past generations, Dracula embodied everything we were afraid of about sex, religion, disease, and mortality (all at once, which is why he's still such a potent character after 150 years). Gojira and all the other giant monsters of the 50s were the nuclear threat incarnate. Batman is our belief in philanthropy and personal power. Iron Man is our faith in technology and capitalism. Spiderman is our adolescent awkwardness, albeit inverted into amazing abilities.

I think this is why superheroes loom so large on our collective creative landscape now, and why they don't seem ready to go away any time soon. But they only hit their stride when they take our internal conflicts and turn them into exterior threats to grapple with. In the past, a superhero was someone who demonstrated how to use power. Now, we're going deeper... not only are we trying figuring out what it means to have power in the first place, we are also examining who it turns us into, and the price we pay for it.

Disorientation

Right before MLK's birthday, I found myself thinking about one of my formative experiences with discrimination, and thought it was time that I wrote it down and figured out exactly what I think about it. It wasn't about me being discriminated against, exactly, nor was it me discriminating against someone else. It was more of a sudden awareness I was given about what a tricky and personal issue it is.

In 1989, as I graduated high school, I was waitlisted for the University of Michigan (and if I remember correctly, it was the only school I applied to). I found out rather late in the year that I had actually made it in. I then went through a blur of getting ready, taking their orientation program, and signing up for classes, which involved a lot of leafing through paper catalogs and waiting in lines -- this was the 80s, after all.

It all went by so quickly that I don't remember a lot of the experience, except for one particular part of the orientation program. This is only because it left me with a strange feeling of unease that lasts to this day, almost perfectly balanced by an inability to process exactly why I was so uneasy.

It was a seminar about tolerance, led by a college student who couldn't have been more than a year or two older than the prospective freshmen he was talking to. We discussed our previous issues with discrimination, and I found that I didn't really have anything to relate. I guess this is because I had experienced such extremes in terms of diversity in the places I had lived. I had attended an elementary school in Ohio that had *just* admitted its first black student (due to the homogeneity of the surrounding neighborhood), and by middle school I was living in a college town that people from all over the world brought their families to. I'd never really lived in the middle ground where people of different colors and backgrounds don't really know what to do with each other.

Near the end of the session, we took part in an exercise... our discussion leader had us all stand in a line along one end of the room. Then, he would ask us to step forward if we belonged to a particular minority group. "Now," he said, "step forward if you're homosexual". And with that, he stepped forward. This eventually prompted another two or three people in our group of twenty-five to move forward to join him.

"Now, step forward if you're of Asian descent," he said, and a few more people stepped forward. "Now, step forward if you're African-American." A few more people. He continued through a list of races, colors, and creeds, and the thing that struck me most about the process was that, as he worked his way through the permutations of human heritage, no group name he called out ever applied to me. By the time he was done, only I and one white girl were still standing against the wall.

The seminar leader wrapped up this informal anthropological study by declaring, "You see? The majority of us are part of some kind of minority!" Which was all well and good, but I suddenly felt rather isolated, not having been given any kind of reason to step forward.

I kept waiting for the leader to say something to the two of us who had been left behind, but he never did. He acted as if everyone had stepped forward, and to be honest I'm sure he would have been happier if we all had, driving his point even further home. Of course, later on I would realize that I should have raised my hand and asked exactly what this fact meant for those of us still standing against the wall, but those sorts of things hardly ever come to you in the moment. Instead, I just felt vaguely embarrassed, the seminar wrapped up, and we were sent on to the next stage of orientation.

Two things bothered me about that exercise, and I've been turning it over in my head for more than twenty years now. First of all was the fact that an exercise designed to show how we're all equal left me (and, I assume, that other girl) feeling excluded. Here I was, about to enter the student body of a Big Ten school. I should have been proud and confident, but I had been left feeling unremarkable and without a particular identity. The reality of this had never crossed my mind before. All the people who stepped forward had some sort of defining trait or heritage. I was suddenly lumped into some amorphous "majority" in an exercise that was trying to show that there really was no such thing. Ironically, in trying to eliminate minorities, the exercise had created a new one.

The second thing that bothered me was that I was bothered so much by that feeling. I left wondering if that were part of the point of the exercise... to make me realize how lucky I was, never having had to think of myself as belonging to a particular group or being filed under a particular label. Should I be grateful that society hasn't looked at me and assumed things about me because of something I have no control over? And if that's what I was supposed to take away, why didn't the seminar leader take the time to point that out?

Maybe it was simply a matter of his not going far enough down the list. If the seminar leader had continued, saying things like "Step forward if you're half-Latvian," or "Step forward if you like to write," or "Step forward if you're not even sure that you deserve to go to this school," I could have joined everyone else. That would have made his point that "there is no majority" better. In truth, we're all minorities of one.