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.
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