REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOD LIFE - Part 3

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

For this week’s column, we continue with our reflections on the Good Life, using as reference the book by Australian psychologist, Hugh Mackay, as part of our personal observance of the Lenten season. This is to complement those enduring lessons taught us through the Scriptures.

I find highly interesting and relevant his discussion on the other false leads towards a good life, aside from the pursuit of happiness, which I talked about in the previous column. Four of these false leads are as follows: yearning for certainty; an unhealthy curiosity about the future; too much preoccupation with the task of “finding yourself” and the meaning of life.

He says that while there is nothing inherently wrong with each of these pursuits, “but they can … easily distract us from the goals of the good life.” Each of these pursuits has “the potential to be an obsession, almost like an idol we worship, because each has an undeniable appeal.”

None of these pursuits however is about goodness. In pursuing them as an obsession, according to the author, we run the risk of diminishing ourselves as a person and our value to others.

For this week’s column, let me focus on just one of these “false leads” to the Good Life:

On yearning for certainty

Some of the interesting questions we ask ourselves are actually unknowable at this time. He lists some of them as follows:

-What will become of us, as a species?

-What happens when we die?

-How big is the universe, and how many other planets out there support species like ours?

-How can there be an edge of space?

-Before the Big Bang, there was … what? And what before that?

-Does it make more sense to believe in a god or not to believe in a god? And even it makes no sense, what do we lose by believing?

-Can all religions be right, or all wrong, or only one right, or is believing not about being right or wrong?

-Are religion and science incompatible or simply two different ways of looking at the world?

-Is one system of governing ourselves better than all others?

-Are the rise and fall of civilizations inevitable?

-Must so many people suffer?

-Will science one day have all the answers, sweeping aside the theories of theology, philosophy and psychology and even determining our moral code?

As human beings, we ask questions and seek certainty in our answers: “We want answers, and so, drawing on our intuition and imagination, we create our own belief systems, fed sometimes by experience and sometimes hope.”

Then we place our faith in the answers. We come to believe as true everything that we have put our faith in. We forget that even objective truths established by scientific methods are based on assumptions that are subject to uncertainty.

We tend to forget what Einstein said that the mysterious is the most beautiful experience that we can have in life. “It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead …”, says the author.

He adds: “Einstein was no religious believer, yet he was certainly prepared to marvel at life’s mysteries and look for answers to everything. He was interested in far more than the scientific, material and quantifiable world.”

Albert Einstein is best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc² , dubbed "the world's most famous equation", or his theory of relativity which underlies modern physics. But he is also known for saying this: “Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters.”

Faith becomes a necessity to lead the good life: “Faith is the work of the imagination; a creative act; a leap; a tentative, hopeful encounter with the numinous; a reaching-out for certainties that keep eluding us. Faith is also about trust, about deciding to settle for answers to questions we scarcely dare ask and whose answers we simply can’t know for sure.

“Faith is also about trust, about deciding to settle for answers to questions we scarcely dare ask and whose answers we simply can’t know for sure. Faith – at its best a noble, humble and often luminous quality in humans – can never be rooted in certainty. It evaporates under the pressure of rigid dogma, which is why there seems such a gulf between religion as expressed in the simple faith of a believer and religion as expressed in the panoply and power of an institution.” [Paragraphing ours.]

Then Mackay asserts:

“This is the great paradox of faith: we yearn to know but cannot know, so we construct or accept ready-made from an established institution, a set of beliefs to satisfy our need o make sense of what’s going on. If it’s not religious belief, it might be astrology, the free market, feng shui, superstition, science, a particular psychological or philosophical orientation – Buddhist, Freudian, Jungian, humanist –or a moral code we believe will make for a good life and, by extension, a better world.”

He drives home this point: “ But if we knew as objective facts the answers that faith supplies, there would be no need for faith. And if faith – that mystical , clouded, elusive yearning – is corrupted by the arrogance of certainty, it ceases to be faith and becomes mere elusion.

The fundamentalist is a person “who wants to transform faith into certainty.” He alone is correct, the others wrong. “Such arrogance relies on absolute certainty, which is why it is so infuriating to those who don’t happen to share that particular set of beliefs. It is also a caricature of faith.

Mackay explains:  “If you adopt a rigid word view – religious, anti-religious, political, economic, academic, aesthetic or otherwise – you tend to see everything through the filter of your convictions, and, not surprisingly, you see what you are looking for… It’s why they eschew the mystical; they don’t want to marvel as Einstein did or to rest with mysteries, they want to wrestle them into submission. It’s also why puzzled that their beliefs are not more widely accepted, they feel entitled to try to impose them on others- believers with different beliefs and non-believers alike.”

He notes fundamentalism is on the rise in all three of the Abrahamic traditions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Why so? “Fundamentalism (whether religious, political, economic or cultural) thrives at times of social upheaval and insecurity. When we are most perplexed and baffled by ambiguity, that’s when we are also most vulnerable to promises of black-and-white simplicity that offer us certainty.

“Given our current anxieties over global warming, international terrorism, the world’s growing refugee population and the threat of economic meltdown, it’s not hard to see the appeal in any set of beliefs that offers stable reference points in a shifting geopolitical landscape. A period marked by rapid and unpredictable change is therefore bound to be a breeding ground for fundamentalism. A deepening sense of uncertainty only whets our appetite for certainty, and the quest for certainty in any context comes to feel like a search for some version of the Holy Grail.”

In science, certainty is also slippery as in religion. Mackay says “certainty in science, like certainty in everything else that relies on assumptions, interpretations and theories, is more slippery than we might care to imagine. Scientific truths are, by their nature, always provisional.” He quoted the British philosopher Bertrand Russell who says science is “always tentative, expecting that modification in its present theories will sooner or later be found necessary and aware that or its method is one which is logically incapable of arriving at a complete and final demonstration.”

The author notes that “Einstein’s theory of relativity is being tested and challenged, and it may well turn out that, contrary to Einstein’s conviction, it is possible for particles to travel at speeds faster than the speed of light.”

Not too long ago, I read that some scientists are talking about us being able in the future to travel not only in space but also through time! They may have found sufficient basis to reconfigure Einstein’s formula!

He concludes: “Certainty is the enemy of reason and reasonableness. It fuels our complacency and arrogance, wrapping us in a cocoon of self-confidence, perhaps even self-righteousness.”

To lead the Good Life, we must take nothing for granted. We know the pursuit of certainty or black- and–white simplicity may distract us from facing life as it is “in all their chaos and unpredictability, their mingled joy and sorrow.”

Indeed to lead the Good Life is to be a realist.  For comments, email npestelos@gmail.com ###

NMP/04 March 2016/9.06 a.m.