Fred Allebach is a member of the City of Sonoma’s Community Services and Environmental Commission, and an Advisory Committee member of the Sonoma Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Fred is a member of Sonoma Overlook Trail Stewards, as well as Sonoma Valley Housing Group and Transition Sonoma Valley.
Sonoma morning meditation
As conscious beings, we have no choice but to know the world we live in. This knowing can proceed unquestioned, on automatic pilot, or it’s nature can be reflected upon.
People come with a host of capacities through which to experience and know themselves and the world. These perceptual and interpretive capacities are biologically fixed. Our capacities (vision, hearing, language, reason, emotion, morality, etc.), are “designed” and improvised upon by evolution. And what is our specialty? Symbolic communication, and living in groups.
For people, language, tech savvy, a social focus, and inherited knowledge are our critical adaptations. Culture and biology, content and process, are fused and interwoven inside us. Culture is the amalgamation of what it means to be human. Culture defines us, by being the aggregate context of what we can know. Yet we are also capable of turning around and consciously shaping the cultural forces that shape us.
So how is it that we construct the word we live in? How do we know anything?
Inductive, top-down reasoning
Confirmation bias is a tendency people have to interpret information in accordance with pre-existing beliefs. Confirmation bias is related to an over-reliance on inductive reasoning, which is to say, with induction, the assumptions pre-establish the facts. In deductive reasoning, the facts establish and lead to a conclusion.
Epistemologically, people know the world through both types of reasoning capacities; induction for hypothesis, imagination, and exploration; and deduction, for actual proof and quantification. Induction and deduction are both ways to frame and gather information, and practically speaking, people use and need them both, science or not. Confirmation bias shows up with a lack of deduction, or actual proofs based on independent, replicable, and falsifiable facts.
Cultural relativity
Facts are one thing when dealing physical laws and math. Facts move into another zone when they are relative to socially constructed, cultural meanings. The socially constructed human world is relative. Facts may be used as supporting evidence in the cultural world, approximating an objective method, but they are usually blended with subjective value judgements, and thus are presented in a biased way.
Value judgements stem from survival imperatives; they are existential issues. These values are not true per se, but the proof is in the pudding. If resources are controlled to one party’s advantage, and they live another day, survival becomes a fact on the ground.
Truth (incontrovertible facts) is one thing in the hard sciences but is much more malleable socially. In this essay I postulate three different kinds of facts: scientific, survival-based, and culturally relative. Keeping them straight, and getting the balance right is problematic. Why? Because in knowing the world, people are not always able to articulate clearly why a fact is a fact.
Dominant paradigms frame experience
For “human science”, i.e. anthropology, psychology, and sociology, attempts are made to quantify data on human behavior, and to approximate a deductive approach. In spite of all good intents, inductive reasoning slips through. Paradigms pre-frame and pre-structure thought, and major debates erupt over interpretation of just what the real facts are. This happens even with good faith efforts to keep knowledge and meaning all on the same objective channel.
Facts and bubbles
For a species where biological and cultural evolution are so inextricably woven together, it’s no wonder we end up so often in an induction/ deduction house of mirrors; difficult to see our way out, always arguing about “the facts.” We are like a book that keeps on rewriting itself, nothing stays solid.
In areas of experience more prone to emotional values, where belief frames thought as much or more than independent factual material, confirmation bias is much more likely. With confirmation bias, all evidence gets shoe-horned into a paradigm, or belief system, and people end up inside rigid, entrenched, self-confirming bubbles. This is why the Greeks invented the word hubris. This isolated-bubble process seems to be a downward spiral, the more confirmation bias one side gets, the more the other side doubles down on their own bias. With this kind of dynamic, never the twain shall meet!
History is littered with conflict
It is notable that human history can easily be seen as one big fight, one big power struggle between competing groups. The in-group goes to war against the out-group, time after time. Why? Survival, the power and control to shape one’s own destiny. Cultural facts are just a prop, an ingrained part of our behavior through which we cat out our animal imperatives.
Right and wrong as an ego thing
Much of this could come down to simple behavioral things. People don’t like to be wrong or told what to do. They cling to a position out of sheer stubbornness, for power and control. A person might be very confident, convinced they are right, but this may simply represent a big ego (hubris again). Easy enough to be a big fish in your own small pond. It takes a lot for people to admit they are wrong, or to have the flexibility to see outside their box.
Education as liberation
There is a joy and liberation in opening up a wider view. Education can be a road to transformation. The baseline human tendency is to be rigid, to focus on preferred sides and ignore the others. And what could transformation be? Progressively more aware of all the ways we know the world?
Personal history
When I was first in college, age 18, taking my first serious science courses, I found the rational world view compelling. One night I was in a heated discussion about science vs. religion with some Baha’i Faith people; no resolution there.
Formative dream
That night I dreamt I crashed a car into a brick wall and died. After I died, I was in the dark waiting for what next. A voice came and said, “you don’t believe anything is going to happen.” I awoke stunned. I seemed to have gotten a message to find something to believe in.
This dream set the tone for many years of spiritual search. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I could just as well search the rational side. After a goodly amount of time swimming in pure faith, I admitted to myself that there had been not one shred of evidence to show me such faith was justified. At this point I made a major paradigm switch to science and reason. I balanced my own scale.
This sea change of world-view was invigorating, the same world and universe could be seen in all new ways. Now I feel a similar change coming, a loosening of my grip on inductive, ideological-type truths, and desire to see the political world anew. Or maybe I’m just maturing, and on a lifetime developmental trajectory, things just settle into larger perspectives. Maybe after a life of studying culture and meaning, I am enacting changes in the only place I really have any facsimile of control.
My value judgments, facts, meanings and culture are not the only ones. Others have their reasons. Perhaps I’ll find a new way to frame the same old order, and break the chain of historical violence and intolerance. At least I may be able to articulate values in such a way as to have them more effectively represented.
A balance of character
Maybe through balancing capacities for reason and imagination, I can live out personally just what it is I desire for the city and county, and thereby be a player-advocate that lives the example? If I can balance and be clear about myself, then I can know just what it means to balance city character, to balance the competing forces that, as usual, threaten to be our collective undoing.
