My tree-lined neighbor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has started planting creed in their garden in the past few years.You may have already seen them-start with “We Believe” (or I think, If you prefer Latin) and continue the multi-colored liberalism tirade: “Water is life”, “Science is real”, “Black people’s fate is also fate,”, “Feminism is for everyone” and so on.
This kind of planting is not a strong, confident consensus action. This is an action of a tense and embattled sect whose members feel that their certainty is gradually disappearing, and are eager to gain recognition with the consent of their neighbors. This vulnerability is common in all aspects of American life in 2021. No faction is immune. Dealing with deep-rooted ideological diversity has never been an easy task; moving it from the local community to an intangible digital realm has brought us a new and confusing problem.
The worldview—a comprehensive and coherent sense of reality, where a person is, what is important, and what is to be done—is one of the most brilliant and fragile artifacts of mankind, and it makes our other artifacts become possible. Without it, there would be no rich communities, few cooperative actions, no culture, no cities, no art or advanced technology-in short, no humanity. It is an artifact in the full sense; it is something we must accomplish together. Every child is capable at birth, but can only develop with the company of a careful caregiver. Through a mysterious mirroring mechanism, the child gradually adapts to the caregiver’s view of the people and things around him. She absorbed it like through penetration, and walked more and more confidently, able to incorporate more and more things into her coherent sense of life.
But the worldview is fragile. Trauma will cause them to wear and tear, and isolation and loneliness will also cause wear and tear. Prisoners in solitary confinement may lose the ability to distinguish between themselves and the world, and cannot maintain a consistent understanding of real and imagined things. A person who is purely lonely often loses the ability to concentrate or regulate emotions and behavior in daily life.The Greek philosopher Aristotle would say this is because we are Son politician, Political animals, living in dense and complex interpersonal networks, are unlikely to thrive outside of them. The Modern Neuroscience Association pointed out that the baseline of brain function is a condition embedded in the network of common cognizants and common actors. Without these, our cognitive load will increase sharply, and we will feel pressure and countless terrible chain reactions. Like an increase in mortality.
However, please note that we need more than just being close to the human body. Our default state is to be in a cooperative community with others who share our basic views of reality with us (what is true, important, and good), which helps to strengthen our own views and keep them stable and stable. Be resilient and respond to reality. New phenomena and challenges. If isolation is a problem, then disagreements on basic issues are also a problem. This makes the diversity that we now have in the United States a real problem.
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Of course, pluralism is not new. Humans often find themselves sitting with people and groups that do not share basic orientations. But the cheeks and chin are important in the equation. If I watch you and your community practice your (for me, heresy) faith day after day, I will see with my own eyes how accidental it is-how it is based on inherited traditions, how it responds to you The specific needs of the community, how it adapts to the ever-changing environment, how it is held by different members of the community with varying degrees of confidence and orthodoxy. I also saw how much the pagan and I actually have in common. This competitor’s view of the world may still be disturbing, but the threat to my own view of reality is less obvious.
But what if we are suddenly immersed in a pool of different worldviews presented only in the most confident, belligerent, and creed form? In other words, what if we find them on the Internet? In that situation, my worldview began to become very fragile. I felt that it was necessary to maintain my own creed with increasingly fierce and straightforward certainty. This frightened those who disagreed with me and led to an arms race in creed assertions. We have fought fierce wars on social media, polarization has increased, and trust has plummeted.
What shall we do next?
My proposal is to disarm unconditionally and be made by all well-meaning people, especially those of us who think, speak and write in public.When Dostoevsky began to demonstrate the truth of the Christian faith in his masterpiece Brothers Karamazov He first put forward the most destructive argument in history in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov be opposed to Christian God. Dostoevsky revealed the fragility of his faith by paying attention to the terrible sufferings that children suffered in God’s so-called beautiful world, and the deep and profound God’s depth that people might have to reject Dostoevsky’s , Humane reasons. Then he went on to state the reasons he still believed.The early fragility of faith makes Brothers Karamazov One of the greatest Christian defenses of all time.
Like all worldviews, the progressive liberal worldview of my Cambridge neighbor is fragile.May be wrong, and very likely Yes It is wrong in some ways. Every follower of it knows this. No one I have spoken to is as clear and tidy as the Garden Creed implies. So they and all of us should put down the armor of rhetoric. They and all of us should publicly weaken our worldview. We should present many deep, profound, humane reasons people might have to oppose us, and then give reasons why we still believe. Otherwise, pluralism using digital as a medium will not work. On the road to garden signs, more and more hostility stems from fear and anomie. We cannot afford more and remain a single country in any substantive sense.
For all of us, keeping the world intact is a deep and continuous work. None of us is absolutely sure that we are doing the right thing. But all of us need to continue to build in the face of uncertainty. There is something in common there-maybe not the warm sense of belonging of a full creed agreement, but a place, even a popular place, where we can stand together.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a researcher at Harvard Medical School and a senior researcher at a think tank capital.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author.
