Spirituality and Politics

[sdi]

A few folks around the community have been talking about spirituality and politics over the last few weeks. There must be something in the air: the same topic has come up with a couple of my work friends. (I work in tech, so a very disjoint community, there!) This is something I've been thinking about for a few years, and I thought I might try to summarize the gist of the conversations I've had there in the hopes it might help others here. (But things are a touch crazy in my neck of the woods right now, so I apologize if I'm not very coherent.)

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A generation or two ago, the US Air Force conducted a study. It was trying to optimize the performance of it's fighter pilots by making them more comfortable in their aircraft, so they measured different parts of their pilots—torso length, upper leg length, lower leg length, head circumference, etc.—and in the end reduced their pilots to twenty or so numbers. They then designed their aircraft cockpits for the average of these numbers, so that everyone would be fairly close to them and more comfortable.

As it turned out, every single pilot hated the redesigned cockpits, and the reason is simple: the average pilot did not exist. While all the pilots were close to average on most metrics, there was always at least one—and usually more—where they differed significantly, and that metric was the cause of discomfort for that pilot.

The USAF was only considering physical measurements, but there is no reason to limit ourselves to those: we can just as easily consider measurements of opinions, or psychological characteristics, or whatever. So in the same way, we can say there's no such thing as an average person.

Let's look at this mathematically. Let's suppose the average distance between two people on any given metric is 1. We can use the Pythagorean theorem to find the average distance between them on any two given metrics, which is therefore √2, or around 1.4. This generalizes: if you consider any n metrics between two people, the average distance between them in this case would be √n—that is, the more metrics you consider, the more different two people are. The USAF looked at twenty metrics, so the average distance between two pilots was √20, or around 4.5× as different than they would have been on any one metric.

I think this idea of being "average" or "normal" is one of the most insidious memes of our time, since it's pushed on us for a particular and malicious reason.

If you look at the news, it's always "us" versus "them", "left" versus "right", "Republicans" versus "Democrats", etc. That is, the mass media attempts to frame discussion in terms of a single dimension. In light of the above, the reason for this is obvious: it's an attempt to group people together, so that one can divide and conquer them: when you only look at a single metric, any two people are pretty close together, so it's easy to stereotype them, label them, attack them; conversely, it's easy to get them to support you, since what's the alternative?

Perhaps, if you're lucky, you've been exposed to more nuanced political discussion, like the various "political compasses" that have floated around the Internet; but even these use only two or three metrics—and thus people are still able to be corralled into some small number of stereotypes—say, five or ten—which is still few enough that people can treat each other as abstractions rather than people.

(The mathematics of that is that the number of stereotypes needed for a given number of metrics is 2ⁿ: two for a single metric, four for two, eight for three, over a million for twenty, etc.)

But, of course, those stereotypes are averages, and there's no such thing as an average person. If we really wanted to accurately characterize a person's opinions, how many metrics would we need? I'm not sure, but it's definitely more than two or three, or even twenty. But if we're looking at even just twenty metrics, the number of stereotypes you'd need to keep in mind is too many for anyone to comprehend, and people are too different to easily corral.

The reality is, if you look at people as people, they're unique and beautiful and impossible to put in a box. Once you start measuring them, by one or two or twenty or any number of numbers, you've dehumanised them, abstracted them, turned them into a stereotype rather than an ensouled being containing a little fragment of Divinity.

The point of spirituality, of course, is to approach closer to the Divine. Seeing people as stereotypes distances you from the Divine. This is why so many spiritual traditions and teachers warn initiates away from politics: because politics and spirituality pull in different directions, are mutually exclusive.

I like how Porphyry put it: if one masters the civic virtues—which are political, as Plato described—they become a good neighbor. And that's good! But when one turns to spirituality, they've chosen to move past the civic virtues to the purifying virtues: they are no longer bound by the social or political arena, but a higher one; being a good neighbor is no longer good enough: one must strive to be a saint. When you turn to spirituality, you lose your born citizenship—a mere thing of the body—and apply for citizenship in the country of Love, where the Soul resides. And Soul is not disparate like bodies are: all life is one Life. It can be no longer possible to take sides or weigh policies, making politics impossible: all that is left is to transcend it.

Another way to put it, I think, is that social or political things are created by humans; in that sense, they're ontologically sub-human. Is not the point of spirituality to go above or beyond the merely human? So why focus downwards, rather than upwards?

Comments

[sdi]

As a side-note, I think this is why so many modern "spiritualities" read like LARPing: it's because they are LARPing. Most of their members aren't looking for illumination, they're looking for community and culture. There's nothing wrong with that! But it's a different goal than spirituality.

[violetcabra]

Thanks for this, SDI. Your writing is brilliant as ever and I appreciate your logical rigor and nuance. The Jungians were very keen on your point that there is no average person, that the statistical average person doesn't exist. They go on to describe what they term 'statistical thinking' the great evil of our times because it destroys the feeling function. Feeling is the rational function that orients itself towards relatedness and agreeableness rather than abstraction, and too much abstraction can harm it just as too much relatedness and agreeableness can harm abstraction.

When you write: "The reality is, if you look at people as people, they're unique and beautiful and impossible to put in a box. Once you start measuring them, by one or two or twenty or any number of numbers, you've dehumanised them, abstracted them, turned them into a stereotype rather than an ensouled being containing a little fragment of Divinity."

I could not agree more! I tried to express similar sentiments in my essay "A Man Hears What He Wants to Hear and Disregards the Rest," --- ttps://violetcabra.dreamwidth.org/369377.html --- but I think that I failed to express my thoughts as succinctly or precisely as you have.

Your final point of created things as ontologically subhuman is a very good point. Of course, politics are important for social realities, but the confusion of politics and spirituality is a point that has been on my mind rather obviously of late as well. I fear that I have fallen into confused thinking in my own meditations on the subject and have shown a lack of the ethical purity you do here. Still, if that were the case I can appreciate your higher standard and morality and strive to better live up to my own ideals.

[sdi]

Thank you! I'm glad the point I was trying to make was clear; my mind isn't working very well lately, though I try.


I tried to express similar sentiments in my essay "A Man Hears What He Wants to Hear and Disregards the Rest," [...]

Thanks for linking it—I went and read it, and I'm with you. Maybe that's why I've gravitated to Plotinus' obsessively monistic system: it's hard to consider anyone evil when your model for the world excludes the existence of evil. Perhaps more to the point of my little essay, Plotinus stresses gazing at your angel and nowhere else...


I fear that I have fallen into confused thinking [...]

Oh dear, join the club! Thanks again for holding me up as a touchstone, but like Alice and the Cheshire Cat, I too am mad, or else I wouldn't be here...

[Alice] tried another question. “What sort of people live about here?”

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

[violetcabra]

many thanks for the response and the lovely quote!

[boccaderlupo]

Multiplicity is a heckuva thing. The more variables one adds...agreed.

Axé!