Through a Glass Darkly

Is the world really as it seems? How can I know that what’s “out there” (reality) is the same – or even similar to – what’s “in here” (my mind)? Many wise persons have stated that there is a difference, and that the difference has consequences. In a famous parable, the philosopher Socrates (as related in Plato’s Republic), compares our experiences to those of prisoners bound in a dark cave, who can only see shadows moving about on the wall in front of them, cast there by a fire that is blazing behind them. These unfortunate souls have no idea of what is really producing the shadows on the wall, and so must content themselves with trying to make some sense of these fleeting images. Occasionally, according to Socrates one of these prisoners might have the good fortune to break free, and emerge from the dark cave into the light of the surrounding world. At first, the escapee will be overwhelmed by what he sees, and will find it impossible to comprehend it. But after he finally becomes accustomed to the light, and familiar with his new surroundings, he returns to the cave, to describe his enlightening experiences to his comrades still bound within. However, returning into the darkness, he is disoriented, and finds it difficult to make his way about. Even worse, his description of what he has seen and discovered is incomprehensible to the other prisoners, and in fact his words, along with his faltering steps, lead them to conclude that he has gone mad. Socrates suggests that this is what happens to anyone in our world who chances to escape the bounds of our limited experience and gets a taste of the greater reality. We think them mad, delusional, or impaired in some other way. St. Paul, too, talked of our experiences during lifetime as like “looking through a glass darkly”, and said that only after we shake the bonds of this mortal existence can we see “face to face”.

This question, about the correspondence between what we think we experience and know, and what actually exists and can be known, is one that philosophers have contended with for centuries. They have given a name to it: epistemology. The ancients believed that we experienced only a strata of reality, and that other intelligent beings coexisted with us among other strata, as dimly aware of our existence as we were of theirs. Science has given us a modern version of the same idea: We can see only a limited range in the spectrum of light, and can hear only a limited range of sound frequencies. Our sense perceptions in fact, really do only provide us with a limited sampling of the exterior world. And while the elves, fairies, angels, and demons of the ancients are no longer a part of this world view, we are told instead that there are microorganisms of which we have no direct perception but which, like these mythical entities, can from time to time disrupt our lives in very tangible and even calamitous ways.

But science on its own cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of why what’s really “out there” has any sort of meaningful correspondence with what is inside of our minds. After all, machines can be made to register light frequencies, or sound waves, or pulsations of pressure, but these “perceptions”, either singly or in combination, do not produce anything like an experience – let alone an experience that corresponds to the machine’s external environment. Even if we concede that the complexity of the living, organic, body and brain has somehow managed this feat – translating perceptions into authentic experience – the fact still remains that the perceptions are limited ones, and so the experience itself must be only an approximation, rather than a reflection, of reality. Philosophers continue to struggle to find a suitable explanation for why there can be any sort of correspondence between the contents of our minds and the reality that comprises the world around us.

The philosopher Robert Nozick provided an interesting insight – though, as he admits, it constitutes less than a concrete explanation, let alone a proof, for why such a correspondence might exist – based on the theory of evolution. Living creatures, in their struggle to survive and reproduce, would have to evolve some sort of mechanism for perceiving their environment in a meaningful sort of way, and would do so in a way that was parsimonious: developing just enough of a sensory apparatus – along with an ability to process these sensations – to be able to sustain themselves and defend themselves against predators. This would explain why only certain wavelengths of light were perceived, and certain bandwidths of sound, along with a limited attentive focus, and a pragmatic, selective retention of memories. We don’t see, hear, comprehend, and remember everything, because the brainpower required, and energy required to sustain such a brain, would be simply inefficient. Hence, all living creatures get by through “sampling” their surroundings, leaving out much more than they take in. We are all, in a sense, partially blind, fumbling about in a manner just well enough to get by. It is a practical explanation, though, as Nozick admits, it undermines that popular truism that we all only use just a fraction of our total mental capacity. If Nozick is right, we are pretty much using all of the parsimonious capacity that nature has allotted to us.

One wonders, if this is true, how we can communicate with our fellow beings at all. The answer is that we all tend to be blind to the same things: within species – and, for that matter, within cultures – we share identical limitations, so that the fragments of reality that we do take in, we tend to share in common with those other beings with which we are most in contact. And conversely, we have a tendency, when part of group, to block out the same things, and perhaps even collectively to forget the same things as well.

But “seeing through a glass darkly” still presents its problems, and these are not inconsequential. Like the viruses and bacteria that can make us miserable, without having even a dim awareness of the consequences of their actions, we, too, through our activities, often do things that have profound – and even devastating – impacts that we are completely unaware of. I remember once, while living in an apartment, the misery of having a next door neighbor who seemed oblivious to the fact that the loud music which he often played traveled easily through our common wall, regularly disrupting my life. Even when I complained of the noise, he seemed unable or unwilling to believe that what he was doing was causing displeasure to somebody else. To my great embarrassment, I discovered that I was guilty of the same lapse in sensitivity years later, when a neighbor who lived in an apartment below mine complained that the music that I was playing traveled through the floor of my apartment, into her own, disrupting her life.

Our limited awareness often blinds us to the consequences of our actions. I have even wondered if that might be the real “judgment” that we will face after death, if we truly move into a state of being that is liberated from the shackles of a limited consciousness. Perhaps, after death, we will be able to perceive and experience in a very real and compelling way the impact that every action we ever took in life had on other beings: feeling their grief, their pain, and their bitterness over wrongs we had committed against them. If many or most of these impacts are negative, and we truly can feel the weight of their consequences on others, this might constitute a “hell” that is unbearable to experience, and which actually compels us to want to somehow atone for or correct our negative actions. And if, on the other hand, like the character George Bailey in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, we touched many lives in positive, compassionate, and loving ways, then the lifting of our blinders after death will allow us to fully experience the joy that we were responsible for: a sort of “heaven”. Of course, for most of us, if this actually does happen, we will have a mix of both heaven and hell. If the “negative” side of the balance sheet is significant, would we yearn for some sort of tangible way to correct it? Would we be given the opportunity to do so, by being reborn into the world as a new human being?

This, as I understand it, is actually something of the rationale behind the Hindu concept of reincarnation: we go through a chain of several lives, fixing ourselves and any wrongs that we committed in past lives, until we finally liberate ourselves from the law of “karma”, or cause and effect. If I caused harm to you in a past life, I might be given the opportunity to redress the wrong when I encounter you again in a future life, or perhaps atone for it in a less direct way, if our chains of lives never actually intersect again. There seems to be a problem, however, with this mechanism, if it does exist, since most of us are born with no recollections of past lives. It would seem then, that without the benefit of remembering our past sins and mistakes, we will be doomed to repeat them: slipping on the same banana peel over and over and over again. Perhaps we remember them at some subconscious or preconscious level, so that there are karmic motivations in the actions and choices that we make in our present lifetimes that we are completely unaware of.

And how culpable are we anyway, for things that we have done that have caused harm to others, if we were unaware – or imperfectly aware – of the consequences of our actions? After all, we are all doomed, in our mortal lives, to “see through a glass darkly” and can never fully perceive or comprehend what the implications are of everything we do. Doesn’t this absolve us of most of the negative consequences of our actions?

I remember reading, as a young man, the autobiography of Albert Speer, who was the armaments minister in Nazi Germany. Albert Speer was, by his own account, a loving husband and father, he was not a Nazi, and he was not even an anti-Semite. His job, and his sole focus of attention, was on armaments production, and he was a diligent, hard-working, and industrious manager. He probably resembled, in personality, lifestyle, and demeanor, a successful executive in any Fortune 500 company today. And because of his managerial effectiveness, he rose to become, for a time, the second most powerful man in Germany. Can he be absolved of the Nazi crimes of genocide, because, as he claimed, he had no knowledge that the large scale, systematic murders were taking place? Speer, in his autobiography, says that he began to hear rumors of the death camps, and was on the verge of investigating the rumors, until a friend and colleague warned him, earnestly, that this was something that he didn’t want to know about. And so he abandoned his plan to learn more about it.

I wonder, sometimes, if the artful avoidance of certain questions or investigations has allowed me to shield myself from any terrible things that I – or my country – may have been responsible for. There are the seemingly little things, like the kinds of foods that I choose to buy and eat, or the companies I support with my purchasing dollar. But there are larger things as well. I remember having a conversation with a colleague a few years ago, and the subject of Africa came up. I expressed regret over the fact that Africa has just seemed incapable of entering into a path of genuine economic development, and wondered if this was the lingering effects of colonialism. My colleague, with some irritation, retorted that apologists have trotted out the “colonialism excuse” for Africa’s continued stagnation for too long, and that it was time for Africans to finally take responsibility for their own destiny. I must confess that at that time I was inclined to agree with her. But recently I happened to attend a conference that was addressing the subject of “conflict minerals”, which are metals that, like conflict diamonds, are extracted in Africa under brutal conditions, as rival militias in certain areas subject the locals to virtual slavery in order to mine these materials and profit from them. The country where this is occurring is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And I learned, at this conference, that the United States has had an active hand – as recently as the late 20th century – in both propping up dictators there who didn’t have the best interests of their people at heart, and in toppling governments that did. The resources there, after all, are quite valuable, and any interruption in their flow might have threatened “the American way of life”. Happily, America’s policies there are more enlightened now, but the electronics companies, such as cell phone manufacturers, who are primary users of metals refined from conflict minerals in their products, are only just beginning to investigate their supply chains to determine if they are supporting inhuman enslavement and brutality elsewhere in the world.

It may be true that we all must resign ourselves to “looking through a glass darkly”, but I suspect that sometimes, with just a little effort, we can clear the glass – at least a bit. If only it was done more often, and more diligently, during one’s lifetime, perhaps that final meeting, “face to face”, would not be such an unpleasant one.