The Phenomenology of True Patriotism

King George III

GEORGE TEMPLETON:COMMENTARY

By George Templeton

Gazette Columnist

The Phenomenology of True Patriotism

 What distinguishes justified belief from opinion?  We turn to a joke from Tom Cathcart and Dan Klein’s book, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…

“Secretary:  Doctor, there’s an invisible man in the waiting room.  Doctor:  Tell him I can’t see him.”

Perfect Government

Existence is human and individual.  Essence is the collective sharing of ideas.  Our Founding Fathers were individuals, but did their thinking have some deep guiding principle?

In 1763 the colonists were proud members of the British Empire.  Britain had a parliament, not a dictatorship.  The Seven Years’ War kicked the French out, but the British deprived the colonists of the spoils of their victory by imposing the Proclamation Line.  Who would pay the costs of war?  There were loyalists, neutrals, moderates, and our radical Founding Fathers.  They needed the very government that they feared.  They would hang if their Declaration of Independence failed. 

We are choosing our future.  Our ethos is one of materialism, tariffs, isolation, blacklists, sanctions, and economic war.  The Trump Administration proposes to solve the world’s conflicts with golf courses and hotels, but who pays?  If diplomacy is simply a matter of friendship with autocratic leaders, will they agree with us when he attacks them personally?  

The three happiest countries are Denmark, Finland, and Norway.  Wealth, life expectancy, and safety do not predict happiness.  It is something richer, deeper, and more meaningful.  We should ruminate over the positive things in life, not just what is wrong.  The wrongs of the world result in an unhealthy sort of “tunnel vision”, impacting not only us but all our relationships.

We list leadership properties:

1. Honesty and Integrity
2. Confidence
3. Inspiring others
4. Commitment and Passion
5. Communicating  clearly
6. Demonstrating decision making capability
7. Accepting accountability
8. Delegating power
9. Creativity and innovation
10. Empathy

We turn to the perception of patriotism.

Living Dead

Phenomenology is not scientific, but it is rational.   It creates explanations from our experiences.  Our thinking and awareness is human.  We cannot measure the feelings we get seeing the sunset, the stars at night, or the fields of flowers extending forever on the San Carlos Reservation.  Patriotism is like that.

Science prefers a material explanation.  Our mind is revealed by our behaviors.  Phenomenology takes self-evidence before, but not instead of science.  It claims that perception is the cause of meaning.  Words like friend, respect, love, bad, amazing, tremendous, and terrific, are phenomenological.  They are shorthand for detailed assertions.

What is consciousness?  Is it just a response to a stimulus?  Newton believed that colors are objective properties in the world (wavelengths).  Goethe thought color was subjective, a matter of perceived essence.  Hegel thought that consciousness was never completed.  When we look at the world, we have no choice other than to use our minds.

George A. Romero's 1968 movie, Night of the Living Dead, depicted hordes of zombies.  They were like us, but they had no feelings.  It would be simpler to be like zombies.  Our consciousness seems different than a mechanical device.  We inherit feelings because they are an advantage.  We use them to make up stories.  

True Stories

Recollection is a story, not a memory.  Robert Ornstein explained in his book, The Evolution of Consciousness, “… Memories, dreams, and imagination are all the same process, for the mind uses the same interpretations whether it is dreaming at night, recollecting infancy, or imagining a new home.  What we think of as our memory is an illusion, as are our dreams.  And, surprisingly, so is the sight you see now.”  Our minds are adaptive, not rational.  We oscillate between objectivity and subjectivity, trying to see patterns and similarity to simplify a chaotic world.  We fill in the blanks.

Stories seem to have a prior essence, already existing within unexplainable creativity.  Our minds don’t start from scratch.  The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875-1961) believed in the subconscious, but he thought that it was collective, a pattern inherited from our ancestors.  We turn to a story in hopes of grasping something more than novelty.

The dark ages (500-1000) marked a period of cultural deterioration following the decline of the Roman Empire.   The 17^th and 18^th century enlightenment turned toward culture, reason, science, and religion, away from hundreds of years of lost history and barbarism.  But it did not reach deeply into the darkness inherit in our hearts.

Joseph Conrad’s 1899 story, Heart of Darkness, visited the problem of incomprehensible terror.  Marlow, a figure transporting ivory from the Congo, tried to understand Kurtz, a brutal production boss.  Kurtz’s dying words, spoken to Marlow, were, “The horror, the horror”, but what horror?  Marlow returns to fulfill his promise to meet Kurtz’s fiancée.  She inquires about his last words, but Kurtz lies when he tells her it was her name.  We are left to wonder whether the brutality that exists at the edges of the civilized world is the same as that hidden in its heart.  Was Kurtz telling it like it is?  Did he identify the horror when he spoke her name?

Nature’s Nurture

The mystery of consciousness dates back to the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650).  Is the mind separate from the body, and if so, how?  Is it just a calculating machine that has no idea of why or whether its results are true?  Aren’t we actors and not just stage props?

Information changes probability.  When we learn, it changes our perception.  The complex interconnected networks of mind, social norms, and economy seek certainty.

Husserl, (1859-1938) had the idea that the world is somehow “set up” or constituted by our consciousness.  He explained the world by way of consciousness instead of mind as a product of the world.  The world is aesthetic, like a subjective work of art, instead of mathematically objective.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) saw the world as equipment to be used instead of “things”.  He claimed that most people, most of the time, are not their real selves and that they become authentic through their capacity to make choices.

Einstein conducted thought experiments.  What would it look like if he were to ride along with a beam of light receding from the Big Ben clock in London?  If he looked back at the clock, it would not change because the next minute could never catch up with him.  And so it was.  For him, time would stop even though it continued in London.

Consider quantum physics.  Here we have a violation of the understanding that the world imposes its order on our thinking.

David Deutsch’s book, The Fabric of Reality, supports Hugh Everett’s many worlds, instantaneously split into hidden existence by each of our conscious decisions.  Its only evidence is the two-hole experiment.  A wave cannot be a particle at the same time, but only when a conscious observer looks at it does it change its physical behavior and its “real “identity.  We understand wave and particle physics, but we have no way of knowing what is out there.  For 100 years we have tittered on the precipice of paradigm change.  It is a constant reminder that there is something that is missing in perception that needs to be inserted in a fundamental way.

But this does not stop in the microscopic world.  John Gribbin’s book, Schrodinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality, presents a simultaneously dead and alive cat.  Sensitive measurement apparatus, in with the cat, cannot “realize” which without a conscious observer.  What is the difference between the apparatus and the observer?  It is only a story, but the reality is like mirrors looking at mirrors in potentially infinite recursion, limited only by the efficiency of reflection.

A Man in a Looking Glass

In 1871, Lewis Carroll wrote a story about seeing the opposite of expectation in a mirror.   Philip Hefner, a professor of Systematic Theology, claimed that the media is our mirror.  It reveals:

1. What we care about and depend on.
2. A denial of our mortality and finitude (Ref. 1982 film, Blade Runner and 2001 film,  A.I., Artificial Intelligence)
3. Alternative worlds, the old and the new (Ref. 1997 film, Gattaca)
4. Confusion and uncertainty.

When you look, do you see fake news?  Then, what is the nature of truth?

Honest to God

Glen Kessler, who runs the Washington Post Fact Checker, counted 10,111 false or misleading claims by Trump in 828 days.  Like pornography, we know “truth” when we see it but we cannot explain what it is.  Because an authority claims it is so, does not make it true.  The majority opinion neither defines nor verifies truth.  So, here is the truth:

Correspondence:  What is true corresponds to facts.

Coherence:  “The truth is the whole”, not statements out of context.  It is relative to history and era.

Pragmatic:  Ideas are made true by verifiable events.  There can be many individual truths.

Semantic:  Truth applies only to sentences and the objects referred to.

Existential:  Subjective truth features intense emotion and an unreasonable willingness to believe that which cannot be understood. 

Relative:  Truth is an opinion based on partial knowledge, limited experience, and imperfect senses.

Can you find Trump’s truth in the above?  Is it exterior, materialistic, and for himself?  Is it interior, subjective, and in himself?

Phenomenon in Perspective

Science often looks at things upside down:  Admittance instead of impedance, compliance instead of stiffness, conductance instead of resistance, Newton’s equations versus energy conservation, polar instead of Cartesian coordinates, discreetness instead of continuity, and sequence versus combination.  “The thing out there”, does not change.

The truth is a complicated thing.   Knowledge is interpretation.  What about “alternative facts” and “unfacts”?  They are compounded by ignorance and omitted details.  Facts are indisputable.  Propaganda and lies are the tools of dictators and the undoing of representative democracy.  Free speech allows them, but we should not ignore it.

An Unstable Government

The Trump Administration is unstable.  It can tip in any direction!  This Independence Day brings to mind how British leadership influenced the genesis of America.

King George III lost us.  He was a different kind of king, a high-energy nonconformist.  His nemesis was America.  His daily diet of compliance and loyalty served neither himself nor Britain.

The colonists knew that the King would use Parliament to get his way, and Parliament would use the King to get their way.  The result was divided government.  The British say he was a good man who was just misunderstood, but history thinks he was going mad (1994 film The Madness of King George).  His famous quote is, “A traitor is everyone who does not agree with me.”

We construct meaning.  We are its architect.  So, what is the meaning of patriotism?  It is something that we feel inside of us and a desire to see our country succeed.  It is pride in America for what we do, not hubris that justifies no matter what.  It recognizes imperfection.  It builds unity.