Saturday, May 03, 2008
Trust inner lights over popular opinion
Liza Field
Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.
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Socrates: Athenians, are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?
-- Plato, Apologia
Why does the "hidden life" get undervalued in our culture? The ancient Greek sages might say that we're too heavily invested in outward appearances.
These philosophers called surface appearances and public opinion "doxa," and mainly distrusted it. Heraclitus was one of the first to point out that, after all, what appeared to be "the road up was also the road down," and other "para-doxa." Socrates especially questioned the value of public fame, wealth, power and other appearances. Not surprisingly, he had the reputation of an annoying "gadfly" among prominent Athenians.
Through the ages, our great teachers from Plato to Buddha, Lao Tzu to St. Paul, Copernicus to Edison to Einstein, William Blake to Thoreau to Maya Angelou -- have insisted that we trust our inner lights over popular opinion. But it's hard. Thousands of years post-Socrates, post-Buddha and post-Jesus, we're still steered by appearances.
To seem knowledgeable, we silence our questions. To appear green, our company ad features a backdrop of Yosemite. To sound competent, we issue statements composed of meaningless abstract jargon. Creating appearances and shaping public opinion occupies several lucrative industries -- besides using up many of our precious hours on Earth.
"Nobody wants to look geeky," a student told me this winter, when I wondered, on a frigid morning, why almost nobody came into class with a coat or hat.
"You're willing to freeze, so you can look cool?" I asked.
"Up North, people wear coats," said Chris, a resident of Fries (pronounced "freeze" in the winter, "fries" in summer).
This New Jersey native frequently came to class in a black stocking cap and spoke his inquisitive and fearless mind, but I noticed during our course section on "does God exist?" even this free thinker began to go mute as the class overwhelmingly championed Jesus as the one way to heaven.
This unintended squelching reminded me why promoting any particular religion in schools would be a bad idea, even for those who want students to find faith. Adolescents are highly attuned to peer approval and eager to belong. Using their (or anybody's) fear of rejection to gain followers of a creed would amount to a cult, not a faith.
But for that very reason, students need access to what people of faith, the saints and sages, had to say -- people who dared listen to their own inner voices. If the only "reality" offered in school is based on outward performance, GPAs, titles and trophies and badges, we aren't encouraging anyone to obey an inner voice that might say something original -- something our society, in fact, needs to hear.
Survival of the conformist?
Philosopher Ken Wilbur has spent decades studying ways that societies and individuals evolve. Fortunately, societies do evolve -- slowly. Otherwise, he says, staged in past tribal consciousness while owning the complex weaponry of today, we'd have blown up the world by now.
Still, he finds our world imperiled, despite its technological advances, as most of humanity remains ethically at the conformist stage or lower -- motivated by self-preservation and its usual fears.
Wilbur says that individuals can progress more easily than an entire society -- as did Socrates, Sir Thomas More, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. But their fate might indicate some drawbacks to growing beyond a cultural ceiling.
"Why?" I asked my class, when Socrates was on trial for not worshipping the customary gods. "Why would we rather conform?"
"Because we don't want to drink a cup of hemlock?" suggested Danielle from Draper.
A young man with a family farm pointed out that we had evolved this way. "People couldn't make it on their own, out in the wild. If you got kicked out, you'd die."
So this inherited survival instinct, we figured, made us wear certain clothes or (paradoxically) not wear coats to campus. It was fit in or die.
"But that's stupid," said Chris, gaping and shaking his head, stocking cap askew. "The survival instinct is killing us," he announced.
"It killed Socrates," someone reckoned.
"And Jesus," said Jordan, who always brought his Bible to class.
After an unofficial moment of silence, we picked up Plato again and went on reading about the trial of Socrates -- who apparently had no survival instinct.
Or did he? Thinking about it now, I realize that under the "appearance" of indifference, Socrates had a survival instinct -- for truth, not himself. He wanted truth to thrive, along with a living context in which any person could dig under the surface and bring out that deeper wealth.
