the death of hope? (III)

They say that life teaches us lessons, and we’d damn well better pay attention. Yes, I despise and mock the idea that God or Fate or whatever the hell you want to call it is calling all the shots regarding our lives and that everyone’s life is flowing together into something good. I believe that God is in control of history, and that history is going somewhere, and that this “somewhere” is a beautiful and wonderful place and time; but that doesn’t mean everyone who’s along for the ride gets a rose-garden experience. At one time I did believe this; I did believe that God had a concrete will for my life, and that this will was something wonderful (and, quite tellingly about myself rather than about God, it happened to be what I wanted as well). As life began to do what it always does—you know, disappointment and regret, broken hopes and fractured dreams—I went to the route of cognitive dissonance; but no matter how hard I plugged my ears, I couldn’t get the scream of reality out of my ears. I broke, violently and bloodily, and I succumbed to resignation. Life was teaching me lessons, and I told myself that I’d damn well pay attentions. Amidst this resignation I sought rebuilding. I tried to restructure both my perception and praxis (the way I perceive the world and, consequently, the way I behave in this world) around a renewed worldview. I’m not claiming that my worldview is air-tight; I know it’s not, there are dark regions where light still needs to be shed, places where mystery and confusion, tinted with ambiguity, abound. But again and again my worldview is reinforced by my experiences (or, rather, my interpretation of those experiences, an interpretation which is intricately bound inside my worldview-paradigm; yes, a paradox). My current perspective on life is, in truth, a reaction against my old belief in destiny (our universe is built on cause-and-effect, on reactions to reactions; the way we view ourselves, others, God, and the world in general is no exception).

“How does life pan out? What carves the paths which we take?” There’s a fork in the road and we end up going down one path while leaving the other untread; who’s to blame? Some will point the finger at Destiny. “It’s Destiny’s fault.” Others will point the other way, to God: “He did this to me.” What’s the right answer? Are we so intelligent and insightful so that we can know without a shadow of a doubt? I highly doubt it; again: the dark nature of epistemology. I believe that there are four elements which play together, interweaving in a dance that can be tragic, comedic, and heartwarming all at the same time. But I didn’t come to this belief just by observing the world; this perception of reality came about when my own belief in Destiny was shattered. When this shattering happens, there are three routes we can take. (1) Cognitive Dissonance. We rebel against this shattering, refuse to acknowledge it; we play the ostrich with our heads in the sand, ingraining ourselves deeper into the prison of our futile hoping, ignoring reality, constantly telling ourselves that things will get better and that great things are in store for us. This route leads to deeper and more sustaining cognitive dissonance, so that the mind becomes so entrenched in this worldview that nothing short of a divine encounter can change it. (2) Resignation. With the shattering of the worldview, the person embraces resignation: resigning oneself to reality in great despair, plunging headfirst into the pit of helplessness and hopelessness. With the beloved worldview negated, such a person doesn’t believe there’s anywhere else to go. His world falls apart, a spiritual, mental, physical, and social Jericho. Few people embrace total resignation, and those who do go out with a bang (literally) or with a few vertical slashes to the wrist. (3) Rebuilding. A close cousin to resignation, rebuilding is often interwoven into resignation, perhaps flowing from resignation’s feet. This is observing reality and making adjustments to the worldview; it is remolding and reshaping our perceptions to fit better the reality that is presenting itself. The movement from Resignation to Hope in the diagram in the previous post has between it, with the arcing arrow, rebuilding; my worldview is in constant rebuilding, accumulating new data and making room for it, tweaking certain things here and there. No real changes have been made in the last 2-3 years, but I’m hoping (selfishly) that a change will present itself through a transformation of my circumstances (which I doubt). Nevertheless, through this rebuilding, I’ve come to the current conclusion that our lives pan out according to the complex interplay of four different elements:

(1) The Consequences of Our Actions. My actions and my decisions help pave the road which my life will take. This is no linear movement: it is dynamic and any attempt to chart it will result in frustration (believe me, I’ve tried and given up). The decisions that we make in our own lives play a large part in the way things pan out. Our decisions to get an education, to marry this or that person, to do this or that, etc. send our lives in different directions. But, unfortunately, this isn’t the only thing that matters; if it were, we’d be our own gods. Our own decisions are subjected themselves to the three other elements.

(2) The Consequences of the Actions of Others. The actions of others and the consequences of those actions come to bear on us. The decision of a husband to cheat, or the action of a gunman in a local grocery store, such events—spawned not by our own actions but by the decisions of others—can come to grip our lives in an iron vice, taking them in a wildly horrific direction. At the same time, not all’s doom and gloom: the benevolence, love, and generosity of others, acting from their own volition, can bring us great joy and blessings.

(3) The Actions of God. I believe in God, and I’m not a deist. I don’t perceive God as sitting high in heaven just watching the world spin beneath him, hoping we’ll figure out how the hell to be decent human beings so that we can get the world back on track (a staple belief in the Enlightenment and which continues to be embraced to this day). As a Christian, I am sworn to Christian theism. I believe in a God who is intimately involved in history and who is active in our lives. I don’t believe that he’s as active as some people presume him to be (in the sense that he cares about every little thing we do and that he orchestrates our lives to the very littlest detail), but I do believe that he is active, at the least sometimes, and that he works for our good (though “good” is a relative term and should be unpacked; but that’s not my concern here).

(4) Chance. I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in chance. I define chance as those things which are the result of cause-and-effect relationships and which come to affect us. A tsunami of cause-and-effect ripples through space and time to bear on us in the present moment, altering our life in small or big ways. An obvious, caricatured example would be natural disasters. Take, for example, the recent Japanese tsunami. Geological cause-and-effects rippled (quite literally) to the shore of Japan, and thousands—no, millions—of peoples’ lives were changed forever, for the worse. This was not an action of man nor, I believe, an action of God; rather, it was the result of geological processes which came to bear on a portion of humankind at this moment in history.

This isn’t an optimistic nor pessimistic perception of things. On the one hand it’s liberating—if there’s no such thing as destiny, no such thing as fate, then we have a say in the matter as to how things will pan out. Of course, on the other hand there’s frustration: our own attempts to orchestrate our lives fall prey to chance events and the decisions of others who, like us, are attempting to have a say in how their lives pan out. Selfishness clashes with selfishness and people get hurt. And, on a third hand, it calls into question the substance of our hopes: if we have been hoping in destiny, or fate, or in some God-ordained blueprint for our lives, then we’ve got to find somewhere else to place our hope. This view may not be pessimistic nor optimistic, but I wouldn’t call it realistic, either. It’s a stoic approach to life, and to hope; calling it “realistic” is to monopolize the term, as if I’ve got some insight which no one else has. Damn epistemology! Nevertheless, I’d be naïve if I thought that my current worldview would remain with me forever. I may have more experience that will cement this view in my mind, or I may have experiences that totally bring this view crashing to the ground. I may be drawn to reinterpret the evidence, at some time or another, but this is my current perception. Life teaches us lessons, and we’d damn well better pay attention.