the myopia of objectivity

I noted in my last post that I have certain concerns about the proclaimed “objectivity” of modernity and specifically modern science, and the fact that those in the West increasingly seem to subscribe to this notion as if we have somehow found, in no more than the last 3 centuries or so, an undeniably objective perspective on reality that negates everything that came before, or at least places all of it in the dustbin of dark, superstitious, and ignorant history.  What I think that perspectives like the Bhutanese can do, and again I’m referring here to the necessary challenge that a spiritual notion like happiness as a defining, in fact the defining, characteristic of being, is stand up and say that there are other ways of thinking about who we are, other dimensions of being than the material, and other qualities than those which we tend to limit ourselves to these days.  For me, starting from a materialistic perspective does not constitute being objective, as measurable and objective are in no way the same thing.  Whether non-material qualities can be effectively measured, as is attempted by GNH, is another matter, but the fact that they are acknowledged is at least of enough significance to think seriously about.

The danger remains that attempting to quantify spiritual qualities does them a disservice.  Quantification through statistics, measurement, and the like tends to objectify something that, in my humble opinion, is very difficult to meaningfully measure.  For example, some of the measurements used in Bhutan to quantify happiness include number of hours spent in meditation, going to community ceremonies, as well as some sort of measure of karma.  Now, all measures are proxies at best, but it is obvious that quality is far more important than quantity in this sort of scenario.  Yet, despite the difficulties, I also feel that there may be something to be said of this type of measurement.  Surely it must be considered that if the young continue to be raised within the spiritual tradition, which necessarily involves a certain amount of hours taking part in these types of activities, then what the society considers happiness is likely to be increased.  One can argue against this, but it’s an argument against the efficacy of religion and not really against the religious/spiritual principle, and if you don’t believe there’s anything there, then all of this is bunk anyways.

 

So, despite the difficulties and challenges of these types of measurement, they may still be effective proxies to some extent, and can be used to challenge overly materialistic definitions of development.  They put forth the premise that, yes, the spiritual dimension is as important as the material, and we’re going to at least attempt to measure this dimension of being and define the goals of our society by it.  Now, for me, this is a challenge to the type of proclaimed objectivity of modern science that reduces all things to the material level, and even now dissects them to the atomic, molecular, quantum, to a place now where even modern science’s own laws break down.  You’d think scientists would notice, but they continue to push for more all-encompassing laws, and more inclusive measurements that will somehow, eventually, explain everything and leave nothing to the imagination, not to mention the spirit.

What I continue to notice, as one who feels pretty challenged by much of the modern mentality, is how increasingly myopic this perspective is, how little we are able to see out of the box of the assumptions of modernity, many of which begin with its greatest dogma, modern science.  An example of this is history.  I’m really starting to feel that, beyond the last 2 or 3 centuries, history no longer matters to anyone, except insofar as it is used to justify, explain, and project our current path.  Look at Google, as a fairly random example.  Every few days they come up with some inane thing to celebrate by changing their homepage font (the big Google word that I believe they call ‘Google Doodle’, and which appears as too many of our homepages), as if the things they come up with are worth celebrating.  But, don’t you notice that they all are very much rooted in modern culture?  Recent ones I’ve noticed, now worse than most, have included: Jules Verne’s birthday, Mr. Dressup’s birthday, Bob Ross's 70th birthday?!  Certainly nothing that ever goes back beyond the 2 or 3 centuries of modern history that I mentioned.  

 

Now, what’s so special about these last few centuries?  Nothing really, except that we are in their midst, and even so caught up in them that we no longer are really able to see beyond them.  If we dare look beyond the horizon of the dawning of the modern, scientific age (and of course, the dawning of our current ‘objectivity’), we see something that is so entirely different that we no longer even recognize it.  We see everywhere ages of faith, of spirituality, of people living in relative harmony with their environment, of sustainable lifestyles that were certainly more difficult, less ripe with comforts, but who’s to say that they weren’t more fulfilling or meaningful?  I for one can hardly believe they could be less.  Anyways, my point is that we are so encapsulated in our modern lifestyles and paradigms that we no longer can imagine life beyond it, life before Google and modern science.  Life beyond this anomaly that is the modern world.

To get back to my point at the beginning, to a certain extent we’ve come to justify our own myopia by convincing ourselves that we’ve found not only true objectivity, but the true definition of who we are.  But this definition is very much rooted in a mechanistic-materialistic 18^th century paradigm that we are too often encapsulated by, and fail to see beyond.  Celebrating Jules Verne’s birthday and forgetting that probably a thousand more important things happened on that date goes to prove my point.  That we fail to see beyond the confines of the modern paradigm makes attempting to define ourselves by more robust measures, including those not limited to the material, all the more important.  Just as remembering that history is more than just who did what where, and who was born on what day.  The most important date in the Western calendar remains the day that Jesus most likely wasn’t even born.  But alas we know probably know the date that the current incarnation of Santa Claus was invented, and I’m sure Google will tell us when that was one of these days, so keep an eye on that home page!

Conservatism and Conservation article

I recently came across this article from the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton that nicely summarizes what a conservative approach to conservation looks like, and why it is a necessary balance to the more liberal approaches that we are more used to hearing about.  It made me happy to know what there are conservatives out there that do indeed take these matters seriously.  And it's a great read with some really important points:

Roger Scruton - conservatism-means-conservation

GNH, Spirituality, and the Environment

One of the big questions I have to ask from Bhutan when I go there - from its government, its institutions, its people, society, culture, and in particular from its definers of its unique approach to development - is: Is happiness simply another level of development, a more dynamic and holistic approach than current definitions of economic and human development?  Or is it something more?  Is it something that fundamentally challenges Western notions of development as material progress?  Is it something so different that the two should be contrasted and opposed rather than compared?  I ask in particular because I have a particular interest in environmental issues (who doesn’t these days?), and I tend to think that the ideology of materialistic progress is irreconcilable with truly addressing these issues in any sort of meaningful way, which I will explain shortly.

 

It seems to me that ‘happiness’ is indeed something so different from ‘progress’ that the two are too different to place in the same boat, that they are like a lion and a lamb so to speak, who cannot lie down together, unless we are able to tame that terrible lion somehow, a proposition I humbly believe may be impossible.  The two approaches begin from such fundamentally different ideologies and assumptions, in particular because the Bhutanese approach is inherently spiritual, in that it strives for an awareness and protection of this particular dimension of being.  In contrast, the Western approach mostly attempts, if only implicitly, to eradicate this under its fundamentalistically materialist, secular, and scientific assumptions.  This, for me, is one of the great problems with modernity, that it is as fundamentalist as anything, all the more so since its purveyors tend to deny this fundamentalism under a guise of egalitarianism and secularism, under a proclaimed ‘objectivity’ that is really only objective for one who starts from these assumptions.  But isn’t secularism a type of fundamentalism that destroys any sort of meaningful spirituality?  Now, this is why I have trouble comparing our Western notions of progress with the Bhutanese concept of happiness, which is explicitly Buddhist, spiritual, and thus necessarily cognizant of aspects of human being beyond the material, the material to which we are all too often limited by modern definitions of who we are.  My plan for my next post is to cover some of the historical roots of these assumptions, and the blindness, myopia and fundamentalism that goes with them, so bear with me if you are not following my argument.  For now, let me continue with where I was meaning to head in this post, that is, towards an important connection that is too often ignored, this being the connection between the progressing secularization of the world, and the environmental crisis that now seems to grow more evident daily.

What the Bhutanese approach offers, or so it seems to me, is a notion of humanity that is not limited to the material, and an attempt to measure human development on more than just the material plane.  As long as we define ourselves strictly in an individualistic sense, as material beings somehow separate from our environment, it seems increasingly unlikely that we will be able to sort out the problems we face.  People tend to think that somehow science and scientists can come up with solutions for our environmental issues, and that they will solve the problems we face, even as their complicity in the problems grows ever deeper, and studies show that for every solution they come up with, ten more problems are created (now I’m making fun of this type of scientistic thinking by playing a game a friend of mine taught me long ago, that if you qualify any statement by saying ‘studies show’ at the beginning, people are far more likely to believe it .. of course, I believe this statement that scientists create more problems than they solve, but I have no actual studies to support it .. but this is the point.  Studies will support anything, if they try hard enough: it’s this type of thinking that is the problem, not the provider of solutions.  Einstein himself said that the type of thinking that gets one into a problem can never provide solutions for it.  Thus, science, at least as we currently perceive it, that is, as somehow ‘neutral’ and ‘objective,’ is never going to solve our problems.  Because it is part of the problem.  Anyways, sorry for the long digression).  

The problem itself is deeper, and some lonely few voices have been saying, since at least as long as scientists have been putting forth solutions, that the problem is spiritual, and not material.  The problem is a lack of connection to natura naturans and not only natura naturata.  The problem is in our souls as much as it is in the world.  And until we address the problem at its root, all we are going to do is keep coming up with superficial solutions that don’t really get us anywhere except deeper into this mess of our own making.  All of the capital vices, which are still essentially religious/spiritual whether we like it or not, are at the root of the problem, are they not?  Greed, lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy and pride, is this not a perfect description of the roots of the ecological crisis?  And if the problems are vices, than the solution ought to be spiritual virtue, right?  Of course, that’s a whole lot to ask of most people, and it’s certainly easier for them to expect somebody in a white coat with a string of letters after their name, to do the work for them.  But until we address the vices in ourselves, which are at the root of the vices in our societies, how can we really expect to solve our problems?  

 In Bhutan, they have a sort of implicit recognition of this, and put forth the proposition that only by allowing and supporting others to live spiritually, harmoniously, peacefully, HAPPILY, can we find these qualities within ourselves, our societies, our institutions, our traditions, and our governments.  I believe that there were times when this was a common approach, when spiritual values kept humanity humble and living in harmony with its environment, at least for the most part.  It wasn’t that long ago actually, at least in most of the world.  It’s only been a few centuries, even in the West (though the roots go back further), since we’ve fallen so entirely out of balance with our environment that we have forgotten not only how this could have happened, but also how to find our way back.  Any breadcrumbs we may have left behind were mostly paved over long ago.  Anyways, the point is that there are ways back, and they probably don’t follow the path of recycling, cloth grocery bags, hybrid cars, or the various other scientific quick fixes that are really just excuses for more and more consumption and waste.  But the work is not easy and begins within the self.  How can we find happiness any other way??

So, I guess I have somewhat answered my own question, that the Bhutanese approach at least has the capacity to define development in a way that recognizes the multi-dimensional nature of human beings, and that can thus address some of the problems of its making, of our limiting of ourselves to a materialistic definition, and thus failing to see that our falling out of harmony with the environment is rooted in nothing less than our falling out of harmony with the fullness of ourselves.  That an approach to development exists in the 21^st century that so fundamentally challenges our own understanding of who we are and our place in nature and the cosmos is a wonderful and astonishing development, and almost seems to turn things on their head like some ancient Tibetan madman who points out our mistakes by exemplifying them, while simultaneously pointing the way towards something more, something better, and something more in harmony with the world around him, the world on which he is still entirely reliant even despite his mad dream of greedy, jealous, and prideful individuality.

Photo Credit

The beautiful photograph you see behind these posts is one of Bhutan by an amazing photographer from California.  She has kindly given me permission to use the photo.  Please check out her website at:
www.taipowerseeff.com

Intentions behind this blog

In a few months, I will likely depart Canada to begin a posting with the United Nations Development Programme in Bhutan, as a Junior Program Consultant in the field of Communications.  While I have recently completed an MA in the International Studies field with a focus on Development, my background is more in religious and cultural studies, and so this placement is perhaps a bit of a stretch for me, though I am confident I can fulfill expectations, and excited about the prospect.  To tell the truth, Bhutan may be the perfect place for me to study and practice development.  Bhutan’s unique approach to development, made famous to the world through its contribution to the measure of development through the use of Gross National Happiness, rather than the strictly economic measures of Gross National or Domestic Product, is inherently conservative.  At least two of the four pillars of this approach (preservation of cultural values and conservation of the natural environment) are undeniably conservative, while one of the other two is at least partially (sustainable development), and the last is neutral and context-specific (good governance).  In the Bhutanese context, this fourth pillar is also quite conservative (Bhutan is a constitutional monarchy after all, and the people practically had to have democracy forced upon them as recently as 2008).

The title ‘Conservative Development’ is intentionally something of an oxymoron, though I don’t personally understand it that way.  Development is something that is continuously being redefined, and as we approach an era when continuous growth increasingly seems like the eighteenth and nineteenth-century pipe-dream that it surely is, based entirely on our ‘smoking’ of fossil fuels, you might say (destroying our collective global lungs, that is the forests and the water and air cycles, in the process), the need to redefine the goals and even the definition of development becomes more evident daily.  I would like to think, and in fact hope dearly, that there can still be a place for conservative values within this field.  That is, I hope that we can still remember, as the Bhutanese seem to be so capable of, the need to preserve the environment, human culture, traditional ethics and religious values, pre-modern life-styles, ideas, and ways of living (if that is even still possible, perhaps ‘non-modern’ would be a better adjective here), as well as economies/economics that are neither wholly capitalist, communist, or lost in the abyss between them (I think of the great EF Schumacher’s ‘Buddhist Economics’ here, more on that to come).  Of course, the term ‘conservative’ is evolving too, and while I am someone who increasingly thinks of himself as conservative at heart, there are for me probably no political parties left that actually represent conservative values, which have been replaced with hard-line economic conservatism and soft social ‘post-Christian’ conservatism, at least in most of the West.  But the focus here is on development itself, what that is, and why it has become (in my mind erroneously) synonymous with that dying golden cow of modernity that is ‘progress’ (can golden cows die?).

To go a little deeper, into the second part of the title, I claim to be a ‘Western Oriental’.  Now, I am of Euro-North American stock entirely, French Canadian for many generations on my mother’s side, and Catholic-German on my father’s side, his family having emigrated/fled East Germany after the Second World War.  So how am I Oriental exactly?  This claim betrays my interest in metaphysics, and the worlds beyond the material, and so I am speaking symbolically here of the Orient by which we orient ourselves (the etymological meaning of the orient), the place that is ‘the source of light…the point toward which we turn in our journey in life, the point without which there would be no orientation’ (Nasr).  I am of the humble belief that the ‘West’ has too often forgotten how to orient itself, due to its lack of a center (how can one orient themselves without a place to start from?), and is now drowning in the ubiquity of its own material excess.  This is what the Occident means symbolically (the great Sufi Shaykh Suhrawardi, amongst others, dealt with this theme in his ‘Recital of the Occidental Exile’ long ago), and for me the importance of conservativism is to preserve some of this connection to the Orient, though admittedly it now exists probably almost as little in the geographic orient as it does in the occident.  I hope some of it still exists in Bhutan, but I’ll have to find that out for myself.  I’ll let you know.  And whether development can be balanced with this sort of orientation is another matter, but it is one which I hope to explore in this blog.

The third part of the title touches on the diversity of themes that are certain to come and go as this blog evolves.  Faith, preservation, and progress I’ve already touched on, the last in a sense being in many ways the adversary of conservation, at least in my mind.  Happiness of course refers to the Bhutanese goal of development (which is ‘Gha-Key’ in Dzongkha, Bhutan’s national language, a word that encompasses both happiness, ‘Gha,’ and peace, ‘Key’).  For me, this is already a much better goal for development than what we are used to, though I certainly reserve the right to be more skeptical and critical once I see it in practice.  But happiness as a goal makes much more sense than endless growth and consumption, especially when you see how the Bhutanese define it, and realize it’s not just some colorful metaphor or poetic fancy.  They’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and they continue to think, about what happiness really means, what it is composed of, and how it can be adequately measured, and I am happy and honored that I will get to play a small and humble role in the ongoing development of that concept and how it is presented to the world.  But to me what is so important is that, for the Bhutanese, and perhaps they are the only ones left, at least at the level of the state, for whom the material world is considered as subsidiary to the inward world, the state of mind, health (at least in the sense of the wholeness of the person), and spirit (what else can happiness and peace refer to?).

For the Bhutanese, and I am romanticizing to a certain extent here, but I do believe that this is at least the goal, the environment, traditional culture and values, and religion must all be preserved for the well-being, wholeness, and happiness (and thus peace) of the people.  Now that’s development, and it is what the ‘human development’ of the UN aims towards, though doesn't quite go far enough in its outlook in my opinion.  So, ‘human and economic development and conservation’ is what is being compared and contrasted with the Bhutanese approach, and there is a certain balance and understanding between them that must be found.  This, I believe, is something the UN faces on a daily basis in its work in Bhutan.  Hopefully these different ways of defining development can learn from one another, and offer insights to each other through how they have come to be, the lessons they’ve learned along the way, and by sharing what is needed for a healthy, prosperous, and above-all, happy future.  Certainly we could all use a little more happiness and peace in these troubled times.