Order versus Disorder
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| Clouds over Baldoyle recently |
Somewhere, sometime, long ago at the dawn of
consciousness, which, I should imagine, roughly corresponded to the emergence
of civilisation around the great rivers of the world from Mesopotamia to Egypt
to China and so forth, there was a first great push for order among humans. Humankind had begun to order itself, to
create systems to help itself better survive in a hostile world. Together, human beings could create and
invent ever easier and better ways of surviving. And so, progress was now possible with these
first steps of co-operation. And so, indeed, prehistory gave way to history as
civilisation after civilisation sought to record all their efforts at
self-betterment, both successful and unsuccessful.
And today, we are the rich inheritors of multifarious
cultures and we possess a sheer abundance of ever-expanding knowledge which has
its foundations in those early cultures we described above. Having been born in a relatively poor and young
nation, namely Ireland, in 1958, I was, like my contemporaries exposed to very
little new knowledge as it were – most of it was then contained in the written
media and in the school books from which we learned our traditional school
subjects. I recall well the arrival of the first television set into our little
town of Roscrea, Co Tipperary in 1962 when I was only four years old. The
National Television Service, RTE, was founded on January 1 that year.
And so as I grew up, the world became simultaneously
and paradoxically both larger and smaller.
Larger, insofar as we would gradually come of age by learning through
the medium of the TV how bigger and richer nations lived. We would also desire the goods they had and
to do the activities they engaged in. We
would want to travel more and experience and learn at firsthand what it was
like to live elsewhere. It became a smaller
world, too, insofar as we are now beneficiaries of what Alvin Toffler long ago
so aptly described as “the acceleration of change” in the early 1970s – so much
so, indeed, that we can now call up any amount of relevant (and irrelevant)
information at our fingertips through modern technologies such as smart phones
and i-pads etc.
Obsessed with Information and with organising it
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| The Public Library, Baldoyle |
In short, we are still obsessed with information –
indeed, we might truly describe it as information overload – and we are equally
obsessed with ordering that information into all its relevant categories and
classes, subcategories and subclasses.
The web of knowledge gets evermore intricate as the world seemingly
progresses. Note the adverb here, as
human progress is surely a matter of philosophical importance, and questions
can indeed be raised as to what exactly progress consists in – thoughts for
another post there, I should think. The internationally famous contemporary British
professor of philosophy, A.C. Grayling puts it thus, and many are wont to agree
with the learned professor:
“The development of science and technology shows us
that, as a species, we have grown clever; their misuse for war and oppression
shows us that we have not yet grown wise.
Moral heroism is required for us to teach ourselves wisdom” (The Choice of Hercules, Phoenix, Orion:
London, 2007, p.68)
Disorder breaks in
If you own a property you will realise how much
maintenance is required and much if not all of it on-going. Things naturally break down – The Second Law
of Thermodynamics and all that. As soon
as a house is unlived in, nature begins to have its way all too quickly with
grasses and weeds growing from every available crack and crevice. In other words, we have to constantly labour
to bring about order, and also to keep order in place lest it suddenly descend
into disorder and chaos.
Meditation as a Coping Strategy
I remember one of my acquaintances remarking many
years ago that no one gets out of life alive.
In spite of all our individual efforts to keep order in our individual
lives we grow old and die. The
existentialists were keenly aware of this patently obvious absurdity at the
very heart of the human predicament: - the self-project which each individual
sets out to accomplish will come to nothing in the dust of our death. Admittedly, collectively as a culture we
amass mounds of information, much art, buildings of great architectural value,
languages, the intricacies of mathematics and sciences of all types as well as
the more creative stuff of poetry, novels, drama and so forth. And yet, as individuals we come to
nought. This was at the heart of Irish
National Broadcaster, Marion Finucane’s interview with the dying writer Nuala
O’Faoláin some two years back. Nuala was
heartbroken, she said, on learning that her death was imminent because all the
order and shape she had built up in her individual life would now simply become
nothing – all the facts she had learned, all the experiences she had gained,
all the insights, the teeming brain, the languages, the literature, the
writings, the music she so loved, the art, her three or so apartments, her
wonderful friendships, her next writing task – all gone, forever, dissolved
into nothing as her individual life, her little selfhood of her own creation,
was snuffed inexorably out. That,
indeed, is the human dilemma, the existential condition under which we all
live.
And yet, meditation is only too aware of this. After
all, it was Siddhartha Gautama’s (the Buddha) own lived dilemma, too, how to
deal with suffering in all its manifestations – mental, spiritual and
physical. For him, the key was to learn
to become detached from the concerns of life, to learn to get over clinging to
either things or persons – in short, to learn acceptance and detachment. This is the Buddhist philosophy of life, a
way to live serenely and sanely in an all too frenetic and insane world.
And so, what does living wisely mean? I argue that it
means something along the following lines:
To learn that there are no easy answers to life’s big questions and that those who propose such easy answers are singularly unwise, misled and misleading.
Sometimes we have to learn to accept events in life that we can never
ever understand. Acceptance, of course,
here is never blind acceptance which is sheer fatalism. By acceptance here, I mean that graced place
of equanimity where one arrives spiritually, having worked hard at either
solving the problem at hand, looking for help from as many quarters as
possible, seeking advice, doing one’s best to come up with some partial
solution and so on. There is little or
nothing more one can do against the inevitable at that stage. Hence, acceptance is a wise position because
one has expended all the necessary energy and a further expending is nothing
short of wasteful and useless.
Knowing one’s strengths and limitations, and playing life’s game in that
knowledge.
Forming good relationships and working at them like a gardener
cultivates his patch of ground.
Learning the limits of human knowledge.
Being humble in a Socratic way – the admission of ignorance can be the
beginning of knowledge and wisdom.
Learning things by doing – the practical knowledge or wisdom (phronesis)
advocated by Aristotle.
Learning through meditation to accept whatever order there is in chaos.
Doing things slowly, mindfully and consequently well.
Perfection does not exist – it is an unobtainable ideal. Everything has slight imperfections
somewhere. Excellence is a different
matter. To excel at something need not
mean being perfect at it. The nearest
description I found for “perfection” was in the Bible where one translation
described it as being “whole” or complete.
Finally, one must learn the harsh truth of all existence, namely that
life is not fair, and by all the logic of statistics could never be. Mostly, life is a matter of sheer randomness
and luck. How, when, where, to whom and
in what medical and monetary circumstances we are born are all matters of
varying circumstances. We are dealt a
specific hand of cards and we had better play them as best we can to our
advantage if we are to engage positively at all with life!
