The balance between superstition and pragmatism.

This is an extension of the “Know That”/”Know How” application that takes some questions into further consideration. The first thing I’d address is Aristotle’s golden mean, which a lot like the idea of building the right reflexes for the right situations. This is mistaken a lot for moderation, but has more to do with knowing how to react in particular situations by applying the proper actions, and the best way to do with is with experience. Every time we fuse a new horizon with our old prejudice and create a new familiarity we tend to apply this to our everyday lives.

This leads into another issue, which is the problem of generalization. This comes about by human nature I believe. Generalizing is our way of explaining complexities we cannot possibly ever explain in detail. You will always get in debates with people where you hear comments like guys are like this, or older people are like that, and we are all guilty of this on some level, but what is more important is how to get around this problem. Since we cannot ever really explain the world beyond our personal experience, it would seem the only way to address the world is with what we best learn “how to” do that works for us.

An example of this is a debate I found myself in last night, where I was told I looked very young for my age, and my response was that it worked against me, because I attracted young girls who do not know what they want instead of mature women that do (a generalization). The response to this was women no matter what age do not know what they want (another generalization). From here of course comes another thing that people tend to do, which is cognitive dissonance. This is where we purposely gather ideas that fit the ideas we would like to believe, instead of looking at the ideas that might prove them wrong so we can hold onto our prejudices. This seems to be a natural human tendency where we do not alter this tendency till it is no longer possible to reject the thing that is obvious and we have to familiarize ourselves with the alien idea. Naturally this person starts to say all the marriages and relationships that do not work out and why you cannot trust anyone to be loyal. This to me sounds more like a projection of personal fear and insecurity due to their own personal experiences than how things truly are all the time.

This brings up my solution of how to get around the problem of generalizations, insecurity, and fear. I wrote before on the power of meaning. This is an important tool because it is a concept that shows if you walk through life knowing exactly how you want something and are not willing to change it unless you absolutely have to, you will be much more likely to get what you want in life or nothing, but nothing is better than something you did not want. The idea behind Aristotle’s golden mean is that we might not always hit the target we want right at the center in the things we do, but life is this ongoing process of continuing to aim in the right direction for the things we want, and continue to perfect our aim in order to at least come as close as possible to what we want in each pursuit, and then with each pursuit we can adjust our aim a little based on prior experiences.

Sometimes research can be an experience that will alter the way we look at the world. Perhaps if we have only had certain kinds of experiences, we may come to the conclusion that things must always work a certain way, but then when we look at a demographic of statistic, we will see something much different. I myself have not had a very successful relationship in one-way or another, but I also do not give up hope, because of research and from the few examples that look like they are working. You would not ask what kind of weight lifting diet to pursue from a skinny person giving advice. You would look to someone who has a strong looking body. You would not look at someone for dieting tips that was fat. You talk to someone skinny. You do not look at people with failed relationships and marriages for advice on how to have a good relationship and marriage. This is why I have a hard time believing someone who tells me all the reasons something is likely to fail and nobody can be trusted. I’m only hearing personal insecurity and fear based on personal failure and only seeing incidents of the same in their friends and relatives. It seems the way to aim at the mean of something is to seek out people who are doing the right things for the results you want.

Let’s take a look at some concepts that would make a more stable marriage. First it can be stated that psychology studies show people do not start managing to weigh the long term benefits of actions till they near thirty compared to younger people who act more on impulse for more immediate gratification, so age is a sign of greater stability and knowing more what we want longer term. We can also see that although everyone’s levels of extroversion and neuroticism vary, these two things also to go down with age in everyone, so this is a sign of greater stability too. People who cohabitate before marriage are more likely to divorce in sociological studies, but one variable to be aware of is it is not cohabitation in itself, but the mentality that comes with doing so. People who cohabitate as a means of “trying things out” to see if they can work are the ones who divorce more, but people who move in already knowing they intend to get married and just do not have the finances and resources to do so right away will more likely stay together. Maybe we should not move in with people if we know we are not ready to marry anyone. We can learn how to live with others by having roommates. Roommates are a good way to learn how to deal with others. The top five reasons people divorce in the United States are: Poor communication, Financial problems, A lack of commitment to the marriage, A dramatic change in priorities, and Infidelity, and if there is one variable all of these correlate strongly with it is age. Young people do not communicate as well, have good finances compared older people, have as great a commitment, have stable priorities, and are still playing the field. One more study is that red states have higher divorce rates than blue states, and the reason I can think of for this one as well is age, because red states have more religious people who do not believe in sex before marriage and/or abortion, so they get married to have sex and kids, or they get pregnant and do not abort and marry the parent. We do not know anything matter a factly in life, but we do have the ability to point our desires in the direction of the things that seem to work, and in the process of doing so we can get closer to and better at the things we desire. Beyond age we can see what kinds of people tend to be more stable in particular situations and realize that these are the kinds of features we should look for in others if we are likely to come close to the same things.

There is one more issue I would like to address here, and that is superstition. Superstition can be an enemy or a friend I believe. Someone like Richard Dawkins would likely argue that all superstition is bad, and the worst of course would be religion, but I take the side of William James more, who believed that pragmatism is all that really matters. Religion can be a positive thing in our lives if we can use it for pragmatic ends that help us get the things we desire in life better than without it. I part a lot with Dawkins on the idea that religion is a meme that had a function once and no longer does, because religion is the equivalent of superstition to me. Humans will likely always be superstitious. That means even if we rid ourselves of religious ideas, we would still buy into ideologies like Marxism and stories like Forest Gump, as pragmatic ways to deal with our issues. The meme argument to me is equivalent to saying we struggled to find food for so long and now our bodies still have this desire to overeat, because evolutionarily we did not know when we would eat again, therefore we should not ever eat again. Obviously we need to eat in order to live. We just need a pragmatic method of eating that does not harm us; very much like Aristotle’s mean, where we develop the proper virtue ethics to suit an environment and habitat in order to flourish the best way possible. Superstition can be a tool that helps us pull ourselves out of the hard times in life, because the stories and beliefs help us escape the current pain we are dealing with, or even give us the idea to try something we would not have thought was possible had we just relied on our day to day interactions with people on the street. On the other hand we might use our superstition to become complacent, and the example I used before was people who watch movies as a way to pass time and not actually use the ideas for potential action. This would lead to a dream state where we never actually achieve the ends we desire, because they are not realistic or pragmatic.

There can also be a problem with pragmatism. What if we learned to be a good criminal, because through experience it proved to be the best way to survive in the environment we grew up in? If we are not flexible we would not be able to adapt well to other environments where this is not acceptable behavior. Just because we manage to be pragmatic does not mean we learned how to live well, or in a way that others will accept. This is where superstition would allow us to imagine a way to be a different kind of person in particular actions, even if nobody else around us is doing them, or we never saw them work. Sometimes watching movies or reading books and studies about other ways people can be and are will allow our superstition to motivate us in a way we would not have thought possible through pure pragmatic experience. Of course it is putting a dream into action and then seeing if it is pragmatic that seems to be the best combination. The proper balance then seems to be to do what seems realistic, but to try what might not be and through trial an error we can become more pragmatic in more realistic ways that are possibly superior to those who fear chance or dreams in the same environments too much and cannot find their golden means in life. I would add that taking our time when getting to know people seems to be more pragmatic in most cases because we do not put our hearts on our sleeves, which makes us look foolish, and can take more time to feel people out and see if they fit our dreams.