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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: January 9, 2005
Latest Update: January 9, 2005
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Weaving Bits of Truth into Our Lives
Today's essay was prompted by my discomfort with my husband's challenge that my second rendition of the tsunami didn't have any, well, dead bodies tossed about. True. It didn't. But I find that I paint death mostly by absence, not by flayed and broken bodies. And there is a definite absence of people in my rendering.Mostly, I was wondering about the absolute disruption, the churning of things, people, emotions, and expectations into an anomic black hole. Change, even almost totally disruptive, apocalyptic kinds of change, is not something we can control. We couldn't even stop the war in Iraq from happening. Sometimes brute force and the arrogant knowingness of those who command that force overcome opposition, even well-intentioned opposition. That doesn't surprise me. In my lifetime I've seen it happen over and over again. But that we attribute the catastrophic results of the blatant disregard of foreseeable consequences to Satan or God or Mother Nature or "evil" instead of to those who initiated and maintained those forces, now that confuses me.
The tsunami has an identifiable origin. The shifting of the earth's plates. But war doesn't. War is a force set in motion by humans, against humans. Hey, look! We can be as destructive as nature. Does that make us God-like? Gee, I hope not. Did we mistake "evil" for a model instead of "good?" Yikes! All this is complicated. And I don't have the answers. All I have to go on is what I painted, and even I can't be sure what I meant. But then I have Daniel Okrent and others to read, where I pick up other clues to what was going through my mind. Truth isn't simple. It doesn't stand still. It moves about. It assumes many forms, and, wow, it adapts to the social setting in which you find out.
So I'm content to find a little piece of the tsunami, that I can relate to, and that helps me understand the bewilderment I feel when humans take away the role of nature and create catastrophic scenes of their own with no help from "wild and savage" nature. Anyway, it's still hard for me to think of plates of the earth as "wild and savage." Somehow axes and gattling guns and torpedos and mines and tanks that shoot fire and the name-calling and blaming and knowingness that lead to what we call war or genocide seem much more "wild and savage."
I keep teaching that there is no single overriding truth. Or if there is, even the greatest scientists in the world can't find it. Einstein really tried, and couldn't. I could wait patiently and quite happily for such a truth, if there be such a truth, and even understand the mechanical gnashing of the earth's teeth, if humans could just leave the worst catastrophes to nature, and understand how little we really know.
Daniel Okrent's article does a wonderful job of helping us to understand that there is no single perspective of truth, not even visual or photographic truth. We just plain have to stay aware and be humble enough to avoid the arrogant knowingness of domination and exploitation.
