Default Disposition

Difference in the ways we meet the world that is there, impinging, as we, part of it, make the next meeting anew

Life is complicated, or complex, or something that by its nature we won’t grasp entirely, let alone nearly enough in terms of understanding. Why do we seek that, often rating it above enjoyment or wonder? I don’t have an answer but find the question engenders some random thoughts.

First, just so you know, this post is underpinned by the dreadful flaw in the whole world monetary system in which we are all enmeshed and driving ourselves towards collapse. You can find out about that by searching. Collapse, whatever it is, will arrive differently for different groups, human, non-human, but I’m not going in to specifics about that either. I’m making guesses at why we have put ourselves in this position in the first place. I tried this a few years ago, considering that the way in which we create money is a causative factor in our world problems (create, not earn: through work we earn money that has already been created; the activity often called ‘making money’ is just an accumulation to us of the already created. So who creates it, and by what man-made choice of process?).

I will arrive somewhere eventually. First, I try the apparently random associations, which are probably not random at all, more likely connected at some level or category not logically obvious. (I do find logic is only as good as the premises from which it begins, so it’s a servant, never a master.)

Recently Howard Switzer reminded me of the work of Elisabet Sahtouris. He quoted from her book Earthdance:

Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, to convince ourselves we see it objectively — at a distance from ourselves — and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism.

This objective mechanical worldview was founded in ancient Greece when philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One school held that all nature, including humans, was alive and self-creative, ever making order from disorder. The other held that the `real’ world could be known only through pure reason, not through direct experience, and was God’s geometric creation, permanently mechanical and perfect behind our illusion of its disorder.

This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present.

Philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato were thus the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, though Galileo, Descartes, and other men of the Renaissance translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated human experience ever since.

What if things had gone the other way? What if Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive, had won the day back in that ancient Greek debate?

What if Galileo, as he experimented with both telescope and microscope, had used the latter to seek evidence for Anaximander’s theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus’s celestial mechanics? In other words, what if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics?

We will never know how the course of human events would have differed had they taken this path, had physics developed in the shadow of biology rather than the other way around.

Yet it seems we were destined to find the biological path eventually, as the mechanical worldview we have lived with so long is now giving way to an organic view — in all fairness, an organic view made possible by the very technology born of our mechanical view.

The same technology that permits us to reach out into space has permitted us to begin seeing the real nature of our own planet to discover that it is alive and that it is the only live planet circling our Sun.

She seems worth a read. Recent reading regarding the world views of indigenous peoples (e.g. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, or Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, plus others) again shows distinct difference in world view within different cultures, different geographies. Almost any discipline in our now so available libraries of thought will produce a distinction in ways the world is seen. (Consider the questions raised in the scholarship of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, or love the anthropology of Tim Ingold: Imagining for Real, or slog through Iain McGilchrist’s monumental study: The Matter with Things. Economically speaking, try Ann Pettifor, or Jason Hickel.)

Why with so much scholarship, learning, practical observations, do we not choose a way of thinking about our many needs and actions or theories of how the world works, that serves us better than this mechanical logical one that we are now embroiled within? Or, why can we not say, oops, a mistake, and start reparation, making amends, finding a better track, a different road to travel?

My answer is that there is one primal need that is greater than our sense, and that there are unconscious default positions, or dispositions / attitudes, that kick in before our thought has even begun, that we learn very early to use, to satisfy this need: the need for survival. The irony is that survival, like anything else is not a given, and the processes that govern it are very largely outside our agency, hence many of us by non-acceptance, or blind hope, find ourselves in “default process”. It has worked so far, do it again. We begin with a basic dilemma, we want safety in which to survive and grow, but to grow and develop each instant requires a step into unknown future, dependent on others and the world outside, all about risk and trust, NOT, safety. Safety / security is not a given, nor within our control, it lies in the unknown whole beyond.

There are very many philosophies, religions, therapies, ways of life, that might be useful to think about, or better than rational thinking, respond to with our hearts, pay attention to emotion, body as well as mind. Within them (not that I could know even a fraction) I find being willing to bear ambivalence, contradiction and uncertainty is the lively way forward towards flourishing, trust life, trust others, and see what will happen. Equally often the contradiction occurs, many, too many, don’t get dealt a great hand in life’s lottery. See in particular the research on Adverse Childhood Experience, ACE, or trauma work, especially that relating to groups, cultures, or inter generational historic traumas. Then the trust life disposition just doesn’t develop well. A categorically contrary disposition, seek certainty, take control, BE SAFE, operates instead, and works, but unfortunately does not allow true change, is much more do what worked last time.

So that’s a long way to say some of us have one kind of default disposition towards the future, which will be unknown, uncertain, and others, have the categorically different default, they will engage with the world as though in a transaction, as though separate from it. In other words the mechanical worldview, not the part of living nature worldview.

I’ve tried to use this notion of controlling a safe future to explain why the economic creation of money from nothing as debt to be repaid was set up in the first place. Possibly it also explains the desire to have tribal national states, to own land, property, etc. and many of the ills that follow, in our so complicated wicked modernity.

At different layers of our being, in different contexts in which we find ourselves, I know we can react or respond in a variety of ways, depending on the fear, threat, love, generosity mix we happen to meet. Education or therapy can change attitudes, reactions, in specific instance, but do they have effect on the earlier formed default?

What I would really like to know is could there be a way in which the default ‘mechanical’ could be tipped into default ‘within nature, alive’?

Then our governments, politicians, people in power-and-authority-expert relations to others, bankers, doctors, teachers, therapists, parents, etc. might find themselves nurturing and flourishing together with all of us, whatever the context with which they are faced.

Until the mechanical only rational view is seen as the problem that I believe it is, this tip to reparation of ills, and reduction of needless suffering, is not likely to happen. Those of us who are fortunate enough to feel the glimmerings of joy in uncertain future nature in us world do have responsibility to live this way, especially when faced with a lack of safety.

I think these thoughts, ongoing. I do not know.