The Obstacles to Knowing, Part 2: Paradox

Reality often asks us to hold two or more seemingly contradictory concepts simultaneously. We may, for instance, be asked to understand how a person can be both too poor to buy food and be extremely overweight. Or a wealthy person may accept the link between carbon emissions and Greenland’s melting ice sheets, and be concerned about rising seas because he has beach front property and just because he is the kind of guy that cares, and yet continues to drive his gas guzzlers, go boating on the weekends, cool his big house in the summer, and fly to exotic vacation spots several times a year.

Important and difficult as this first step of accepting paradox may be, reconciling the contrary ideas will require still far more from us yet. Contradiction is often a case not of reality but of perception. Some misconceptions can be easy to amend with a little more information. A poor person may be overweight, we find, because sugary, fat, processed foods are cheap. On the other end of the spectrum, some paradoxes seem intractable. Why, for example, will people of means —no matter how otherwise compassionate and generous— inevitably place home, cars, and careers above human equality and a clean environment. Homelessness and hunger abound, yet, rather than tithe, we will buy the bigger house, the better brand, the family flights to the Caribbean. The resolution of such paradoxes may require a dissolution or even destruction of the boundaries of our beliefs, of our worldview, of the box that culture has created for us. These ventures can feel surprisingly dangerous. Spiritual leaders warn seekers of the dangers of breaking boundaries too quickly and without guidance. At the very least, it can cause a person to experience temporary cognitive, emotional, and existential dissonance. When, for example, the American elite had to reconcile their decision to attack Iraq and the resulting three trillion dollar war with the reality that, cruel a dictator as Saddam Hussein was, he was not an enemy of the security or sovereignty of the United States. Or when my friend realized that he was morally obligated to change his big American lifestyle, although his expensive education, decades of hard work, high paying salary, and family expectations encouraged, indeed compelled, him to tow the party line and enjoy his successes, serving as a role model for the rest of us.

On the societal scale, epiphanies can lead to revolution. What if, for instance, we collectively came to the realization that all evidence clearly indicates that the only way humanity could possibly live sustainably on the planet was by reducing our population by two-thirds within a generation, and that all the remaining two-and-a-half billion people had to immediately reduce their standard of living to, say, an average $11,000 a year? This would require some sacrifice of material and biologic desires on most every one of us.  Now, we are not persistently altruistic creatures, but neither are we totally selfish ones. If given the chance, most of us will behave in ways that are honest, compassionate, and reasonable.  But would we be willing to sacrifice the biological imperative of parenthood and the pleasure of our large lifestyles for the security of future generations? The more we had to lose in such a radical transformation, the more resistant we would likely be. If history and experience can serve as guides, neither the captains of finance and industry, nor the oligarchs, nor the leaders of nations are going to voluntarily give up their wealth and power. And likely neither will the merely affluent; that is, the world’s materially richest billion or so—that’s us, by the way. Actually resolving paradox sometimes requires a transformation of thought and action that can be sadly beyond our capabilities. Material self-interest alone can hold us back from taking even the most obviously necessary and simple of actions.