I haven't written much yet publicly on the new perspective or belief system I have been attempting to formulate over this past year, a perspective that I call Ultimate Realism, which is perhaps best summed up by the quote from Patchen's
Memoirs of a Shy Pornogrpaher: "Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want to exist... does exist."
This view first occurred to me one day last year during a week of spiritual-existential difficulty. I had gone to a local bar and ran into an acquaintance, who said, having not seen me in ages due to my focus on school and writing, "welcome back to the real world," to which I could only reply, but isn't everywhere also just as real? and then wandered down the street struck by the total implications of everything around me being that real. There is some sense in which we tend to believe that only those habits and experiences that we usually have are really real, or at least of the most real importance to us, forgetting that other experiences we don't have are just as real. And beyond existing situations, every content of our imaginations and the stories we tell is real, in that these have real effects in the real world. And ultimately, any perspective that will allow us to articulate our lives in the whole of such a multifaceted reality, and perhaps allow us to formulate a perspective of global significance and understanding, will have to put us in relation to that whole, not just as it is scientifically and historically understood, but in relation to all that humans have said, imagined, believed, and dreamed.
This view has come out of years of questioning spiritual beliefs and the nature of the stories we tell. How do we, as human beings in a world with other human beings, deal with the fact that people have divergent and often contradictory views on what the world is and our place in it? Historically, belief systems have clashed, and continue to clash because each side takes their perspective as most true and right, whereas if one view was somehow objectively true and right there should be no cause for conflict; and yet there is. In my own life I have struggled with such limited perspectives, not knowing in what to believe, as the beliefs always seemed too small, and yet needing to believe in something, to tell some kind of story, and finally recognizing that any belief I would want to hold would have to be large enough to contain all possibilities of believing.
Similarly I fear global destruction due to the clash of these limited perspectives, and that we as a species do not have the stories to set us in relation to where we are now that might allow us to continue into the future in a meaningful, healthy, and positive way. The stories we are prone to tell today are often too small, quotidian, dealing with failure, comeuppance, and the meaningless joy ride of post-modernity, whereas we need a perspective that can address the Universe as a whole, for future generations of humanity in this Universe. These stories must be ultimate in order to place us and our actions in the widest set of meaning or significance necessary for survival.
My old professor, Dr. Fred Clothey (a student of famed mythographer Mircea Eliade), suggested that the stories we tell can tell us about ourselves, in effect modeling our understanding of reality in order to authenticate current actions and allow future actions. Our stories/ myths/ beliefs/ perspectives, etc. can do this precisely when they are cast in an "aura of ultimate significance," that is, by referring us to the widest possible scope of experience and understanding, to our cosmic and social beginnings, to our longed for and feared endings, to our ideals taking on human form. We find our place and being in between the limits of the real as we know it.
One such ultimate signifier, that has had a direct effect on real occurrences, is the concept of God(s). While belief in supernatural beings has allowed articulation of our relation to society and mortality, is has, perhaps most clearly and distressingly, served as a justification for centuries worth of horror and cruelty: crusades, inquisitions, terrorism, or just plain ignorance. But we are prone to forget in our polarized times that this personification of ultimate ideals was also a necessary and integral perspective for the development of scientific reasoning, framing an objective and total perspective that we humans could then hope to achieve ourselves, a belief that has existed coterminous to science up through the 20th century. Contemporary atheists might be glad that God is no longer a reference for rational understanding, but "His" death has negative impacts as well: God has traditionally not only been a signifier for ultimate perspective and knowing, but also for perfection and goodness, in short, ethical understanding of behavior, without which we do things like build the atomic bomb. Technology runs rampant when not placed in the widest relation to how it might rightly be used, or the lack of an ethical signifier allows the cultural insecurities that haunt us to become manifest, and such horrors not only be imagined but made real. One imagines a similar lack of ultimate significance in the perspectives that have allowed western culture's unparalleled material consumption, environmental destruction, and continued ideological warfare on the rest of humanity.
I am not arguing here for a return to a belief in the traditional monotheistic God or earlier gods. These stories, as we have seen, are just too small and conflict-provoking compared to those perspectives that now need to be adopted. I am arguing though for a greater belief in the reality and efficacy of the contents of our stories and imaginations, and an awareness of how these otherwise subconscious narratives influence the real world.
One of the problems to this approach is the primacy we give to literal truth, vs. the obvious falsity of our "true" representations of reality. I am a huge fan of stories of the fantastic, of the magical, supernatural, weird, heroic, or sci-fi, which, looking at the predominance of these themes in the current cultural media and imagination, I believe I am not alone in. But why do we love supermen, zombies, and the end of the world? There has been a trend in storytelling, dating from the late 18th century, of attempting to represent reality as it "really is," social or quotidian realism, and not as an allegorical reference for otherwise real things. Fiction, when it first was read as not literally true, was cast as "petite histories," in order to accept stories they had to mimic reality while being divorced from talking about reality. My immediate response to all this is, there's already too much of the world we experience on a daily basis, why create more of it, when stories beyond the everyday may raise possibilities of experience and understanding more than that which we are already familiar with. That familiarity constrains us, by being real, to the obviously inadequate belief systems we now live under. We hold up what we believe is a mirror and say, this is real, and because we say it, that marks the bounds up what we will allow to be really real.
My second issue with realism is that
it is not reality despite how it primps and masquerades itself as such. It may represent aspects of reality, but does so by relying on and reaffirming our assumptions about how the world is and should be, which constrains us to accepting those views and realities as more true or valid, to the exclusion of wider views. And today it seems our view of the real is that it frankly sucks and nothing matters anymore. And any attempt to actually discuss real human issues in an emotionally valid way is negated by the irony and scorn with which we articulate the real world. The fantastic however, by being non-real and symbolic of the real (mythopoetic in Tolkien's terms), precisely allows us to highlight those human themes and conditions we want to examine in truthful ways. But in order to even accept the contents of fantastic stories we must (as Coleridge first suggested) suspend our disbelief of those things that couldn't be literally true in our everyday experience. We no longer have a problem leaping into wizard fights or across star systems, we can suspend disbelief but we are never asked to truly
believe, and thus are not as prone to take such fantasies as being symbolic or ultimately significant for how we really are or could be in the world. We are content to let them be mere entertainments and diversions rather than suggestions of possibility.
Yet, are ghosts and gods really real, or is this even the right way of framing the question? There is a sense that certain things are existentially real, they commit us to accepting their physical reality, being right in front of us. The invisible and imaginative do not so commit us; one can not empirically and scientifically prove a god's actual existence. To argue one way or the other for this is to miss the entire point about gods. But one can clearly see the effects that belief in such unprovables has on our world, both on our perspectives and psychologies and in actual historical occurrences. Ignoring and belittling the immaterial causes of such beliefs and effects does little to add to our understanding of ourselves in the world, allows the results of inappropriate or too-small beliefs to continue unchecked, and limits the human imagination to articulate new possibilities of being and understanding being, which are necessary for our current and continued survival, let alone enjoyment and well being. On the other hand, if we do not remember that the stories we tell are only stories, that have been made up despite their real effects, we run the risk of mistaking the stories as literally true, thus causing us to act in dangerous and inappropriate ways, when imagining better stories to live by and through is always an option (and it is this lack of awareness of the power of our symbols that I mean by the absent narrative).
I do not know where we will go from here, but I am wary and sick of the post-modern skepticism that rejects any ultimate significance in favor of what we can directly lay our hands on (and in so doing, strangle it to death). I would prefer to see interconnections of the layers of reality rather than the whole's deconstruction and rebuttal. Acting as if we know everything and nothing really matters is perhaps the smallest and most dangerous perspective one could hold. Ultimately, we exist in a Universe which we barely understand, and in which we are a bare speck, and perhaps in that widest view humanity is indeed meaningless and fated to extinction for lack of any better options. And yet it is also possible to believe, and live by the belief, that life and our consciousness of life may be more than a random fluke or evolutionary mistake; not that we serve some clear teleological purpose or extant will of God, but that for all these unknowns we are still real, and still here, and confronted with the implications of that for all reality.
Though reality may be inherently meaningless we have the choice to take on meanings and act on those meanings, to continue to be and gather greater understanding and significance, both on this planet and in the Universe as a whole, should we choose to accept this mission. Anything less than such an Ultimately Realist perspective sells ourselves short, and will only propel us down the road of meaninglessness and destruction. But if we can perhaps articulate a perspective wide enough, not just for all humans, but all life in general and beyond life, then perhaps we can continue on until that perspective, and all else we can imagine, becomes real.
