Rights AND Responsibilities not OR Responsibilities

Looking back at a discussion from 4 years ago, here are my current thoughts on Jordan Peterson’s view of how we speak to young people about rights and responsibilities, with thanks to Giles Davis and Michael Snow for their contributions to the original discussion which are incorporated here.

This is my understanding of Peterson’s view:

‘Young people are being fooled about ‘Rights’.

‘It’s better for young people to focus on their responsibilities rather than their rights. Rights, though important, are inherently selfish; they are about me. Responsibilities are selfless; what I must do for others or wider society.

Young people have been cared for all their lives thus far. As adults they need to give back to the world. But it’s not merely an issue of obligation. All people, including youngsters, need meaning in their lives. Meaning is to be found in responsibility, what can I give, not rights, what do I get.

People find meaning in the responsibilities within their careers, their family, their friends, charitable work they do for others, the education they pursue and the voluntary obligations they undertake within society.

It’s not the rights that are granted to you so that you can be awarded your rewards and privileges that will make your time-limited life on Earth worthwhile. It is instead the sacrifices you make to the highest good that you can conceptualize and strive to attain. The responsibility you take for yourself and within society.

Beware the pedlars of more and more ‘rights’. They wish to turn you into someone who is simultaneously privileged and victimized.
Whining; narcissistic; noisy; demanding; chronically resentful and unhappy; distracted from seeing the bigger picture; everything in dualistic conflict.
Importantly, always looking to authority to give you something; to make your life better; infantilising you.

Instead, take on responsibility; shoulder them willingly; make yourself useful to others; stop telling others how evil they are and how righteous you are; find the heaviest burden you can bear and bear it stoically, forthrightly, admirably and without complaint.

___________________________________________________ 

To me it's about balance, as with most things. It's good that young people are aware of their rights (i.e. not to be abused), but they also need to be aware of their responsibilities. One without the other potentially leads to problems. Both/And not Either/Or. Yin & Yang must be in balance.

But we aren't very good at getting balance on social change in the UK. We see something that we think needs changing and instead of aiming for balance, so often the pendulum moves to the opposite extreme, which is just as bad, (an extreme), from the situation before change was initiated.

It's because activists & campaigners are very good at calling for and making the case for change at a political/societal level but don't think through to the end game.
Zealots seldom do.
In a sense, they get caught up in the frenzy of war but don't have a clear idea what the peace should look like or how to bring it about in a fair way
They seem happy with the victor simply becoming a tyrant, since they assume they will win. It’s the mindset of Hitler and Stalin and Mao etc.
They also give no thought to the unintended consequences of their campaigns on wider society.
Total victory is the only goal; the aftermath will have to take care of itself.

But as I’ve said above, under the ideas of non-dual philosophy, one needs to get away from the idea of EITHER/OR rights and responsibilities, and look at BOTH/AND.
It's the right of every human being to find out who and what they really are. And more, it’s their responsibility to find that out.
To discover. Dis - cover.
In other words to pull back the veil; to come out of what one is not, to comprehend really and truly what one is.

That is the real right AND the real responsibility of each and every one of us.

Memory: are we letting the past dicate our present?

You know how decades later, we remember really clearly things from our childhood, teenage and early adult years? 

For example, I know I remember poetry and music learnt in those years, yet music I learnt new in the last 15 years, I have to almost re-learn from scratch when coming back to it only a year or two later.

My point is that the experiences in our formative years really imprint themselves on the areas of our brain that deal with memory (hippocampus; neo-cortex; amygdala).

This can be a good thing. 
As well as factual information retrieval, having clear memories of your distant past to memorialise relatives long dead or friends long lost touch with is useful psychologically. Memories to cherish. 

But it can also be a bad thing, depending on the subject and how it affects you now.

The evolutionary purpose of memory is NOT so we can remember the past in the sense of an historical record or a memorial or nostalgia. 
It's so we don't repeat stupid mistakes and negative behaviours, and so that we DO repeat behaviours that were positive and worked for us.

That’s why societal (not just individual) memory, is so important. 
Chaos ensues when we ignore or tear-up the lessons learned from the past with hubris (foolishness), as opposed to changing carefully and at a pace that that doesn’t cause chaos (wisdom).

When it comes to our socio-political views, we can find ourselves thinking and therefore speaking about them in a way that may have been true (as least as we thought) then, but isn’t true, or at least has changed significantly, now.

Views set in stone on important matters before our brains have finished developing (around 23 for most), and before we have had wide experience of society, will often not be nuanced in the way wisdom would require.

I was fortunate as a teenager in that, being a good singer and good all-round sportsman, I was asked to join clubs & societies outside of school, where I mixed socially with adults of all ages, classes and political persuasions.

However immature I’m sure I seemed to some, I benefitted and matured much faster for these experiences, than if the first time I had meaningful interaction with adults outside of my family and education, had been when I started my first job. 

Is the lack of these wider adult social interactions, replaced by online peer-group interactions, the source of much teenage and student angst for example?

Whatever, it's so important not to get sucked into having a closed-minded view, based on something we read, or heard, or were told, or experienced, often decades ago. 

Open-mindedness and a willingness to cast-off past views where appropriate, is difficult, but also liberating for you and even for others.

Difficult because it requires you to genuinely, in good faith, re-visit your long-held opinions and admit the need to change, which can be painful. Pride and embarrassment can be hard negotiators.

Liberating because, just the willingness and ability to try, makes you a better person, and who doesn’t like that feeling? 

But also because in changing your mind, shifting your position, even if only on some issues, and only partially, you are acknowledging the fact that society and individuals change, and that you are willing and able to adapt. 

We’ve all had some sort of epiphany in life; where we have a sudden light-bulb moment of realisation about something we thought we knew then realised we were wrong, or a problem we couldn’t fathom and now we get it. 
Even when the subject is trivial, it’s a wonderful feeling isn’t it?

Liberating also for others because, along with this more open, honest, free way of thinking, will come a change in your character; often materialising in a happier more energised manifestation of your humanity.
It may even nudge others to make some changes in themselves.

Now, it won’t cause joy or liberation to closed-minded people who feel comfortable (I would say trapped) in that mode of being, and comfortable with how you were before; your towing of the same line as them; your mutual bolstering of each other’s self-righteous, tribal, closed-minded egos.

But by being open-minded; genuinely exploring other views and possibilities; not seeing changing your mind as threatening who you are; seeing well-considered change as right, not embarrassing; seeing the past as something to learn from, both the good and the bad, but NOT something that should control your behaviours and views many years later, you become free; seeing things more clearly. 

A good practice for this is to steel-man a viewpoint you disagree with. To think as though you're going to debate in favour of a view you disagree with. 
Done with integrity, this shows you that other viewpoints are often neither stupid nor evil; even if you still, on balance, disagree.

So, as well as using our memory for memorial; nostalgia; error minimisation; and necessary information retrieval, let’s use it to reassess our values; our purpose; and how we interact in society. 

Importantly, such change doesn’t have to be seismic.
Drastic change often throws the baby out with the bath water.

I recall a situation, 20 years or so ago, when a couple married for 15 years and with early teenage kids split-up because the woman had had a cancer scare, and the reappraisal of her life changed her so dramatically, that, among other things, she ended the marriage. Her husband’s comment was that she became a totally different person. While this may have been right for her, there is certainly no need for that degree of change in order for the advantages of an open non-agenda-driven reassessment of your views & attitudes to show themselves.

For example, it can simply come in changing what you choose to do with your leisure time; how you express yourself; how you interact with others; being clear as to what is truly important; whether to change your job or work-life balance.

With open-minded calm reappraisal, putting defensive pride in your previous views to one side, you often gain insights such that new ideas, understanding, meaning and purpose outside of your usual routine, starts to emerge.

Positive purpose, not the purpose of the insular, the tribal, the ideologue; the activist zealot, which is ‘my way or else’. 

Rather, the purpose of the wonder-explorer, the wise traveller; the seeker of wisdom.

So let’s use our memory for the obvious things, yes, but not let it control who we are now; for with a questing and open mind, who knows who and what we could become?

Message to the rationalist atheist: It's NOT science or spirituality - it's BOTH

I disagree with you, the rationalist atheist, only about one material thing and one consequence of that.
The key material issue is that I think the universe was brought into being by some creating source, whereas you think it just happened coincidentally, out of literally nothing, without a creating source. [The more recent idea that the universe has 'always' been there is just a cop-out, an attempt not to have to explain how it came about].

To many religious or spiritual people, your view on this is just as irrational as you claim theirs to be. How can 'something' come from 'nothing' in anything other than agenda-driven hypothesising?

After the creator issue, you and I agree on everything that science can explain. That you don't seem to accept that there is anything science can't or at least won't in the future be able to explain is, I assume, our only other disagreement.

A view that science will eventually explain literally everything about the human condition, including consciousness and how it is derived, let alone the existence or not of a creating source, sounds like faith to me; that thing you disparage in the religious.

I'm not attracted by semantic arguments about supposed difference between the words faith and belief. The Christian creed starts CREDO, I believe, not I have FAITH.

The two words are often used interchangeably; indeed I do so.

Where you use the word 'belief', to simply mean what you think you know at the moment, I would use 'understanding'. i.e. 'my current understanding is X, but I'm happy to change that with suitable evidence'.

I am in agreement with that, but as a 'creator source' of the universe is impossible to either prove or disprove in your rational scientific terms (not finding something doesn't mean it's not there; not knowing something doesn't mean it's not there to be known), arguing about the existence or otherwise of this is pointless, since we simply think about it in totally different ways, and that won't be reconciled by science, because to me, science is just one way of interpreting the universe, the Earth and Humanity, whereas for you, it seems it's the only way.

Both/And not Either/Or would make the world a much more contented place. 

Hence my recommendation of Michael J Snow’s book, Mindful Philosophy. The closed-minded will struggle with it, of course; the open-minded should find much that is helpful to their well-being.

Science needs to be rescued from the political ideologues

Until yesterday (historically), it was accepted in science that there is no such thing as unquestionable consensus.
Indeed, that the concept of consensus or ‘settled science’ is lazy; unimaginative; restrictive; dangerous.
Any agreement was, at best, what we think we know at the moment.
But that it was unquestionable, either scientifically or morally, would not have been a mainstream view; indeed would have been vehemently resisted by the majority.
We mustn't stifle learning by restricting inquiry, was the majority view.
Judgments about the efficacy and/or desirability of ideas must come after they have been investigated, not before.

Unquestionable scientific consensus equals complacency & laziness at best; and, as anyone who's been awake in recent years has realised, serious error and tyranny at worst.

Consider all the knowledge and discoveries that wouldn’t exist if, for example, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Darwin, let alone engineers and medical scientists, had just shrugged their shoulders and gone along with the prevailing mainstream view of their time.
Forget life-saving blood transfusions, pass me the biggest leech you can find and cross your fingers.

Science, in its pure and proper sense, is about constant questioning, hypothesising and testing to form theories that appear to work, but that are still subject to further questioning, hypothesising, testing etc.
And this has worked well because, until recently, science wasn’t conducted based on the pre-formed answers required by those funding the research, or the personal political agendas of the scientists or those on the Boards of the companies they work for.

Politicised science should be anathema, not only to scientists but to the rest of us who depend so much upon what science does for us.

But if the blatant politicisation we see of subjects in the Arts, Humanities and soft-sciences (sociology; psychology) is allowed to bleed into the hard sciences, the errors and indeed deliberate misusing of science will increase, bringing misery to the majority of humanity before very long.