Pettiness (really sloppy first draft)

My questions for today are: what is petty? What is considered petty? What do we think of as petty? Who do we think of as petty?

But before I think about that, I should also ask, why do I focus on pettiness?

The feeling that life amounts to something for us as a single consciousness is what keeps people alive and moving in 21st century modern industrialized world. This may have not always been the case, but I think a fairly strong argument could be made that most people living right now have an underlying sentiment that the lives they are leading are meaningful in some way.

Now, what is interesting is what happens when people think consciously about this question of meaning or significance: most people who legitimately scrutinized their lives and tried to 'measure' its significance would probably find it lacking, even if at the cosmic level (i.e. we are only species on a lonely planet bound to die out before we find a way to inhabit other planets).

From this it looks as if significance cannot be a measurable thing; it has to be a thing felt continually and felt subconsciously. Perhaps something of this feeling of granting significance is inherent in our 'human nature' (and perhaps it isn't so much that we grant significance to things as it is that we are granted the feeling of significance when we interact with our world). If it is part of our nature to be granted the feeling of significance or satisfaction as we live our lives in communication with others, with nature, and with art, then how is it possible that this feeling of significance or meaningfulness can ever be lost?

Perhaps part of the way we allow significance to draw itself into us and give us energy to get through our days is by constructing patterns. Without a pattern with which to understand reality, this reality floods into us as pure chaos and we cannot feel the significance of, say, eating an apple or petting a dog.

But very few experiences register as pure chaos - or do very many? I don't know! How is it possible that something like petting a dog is simply not understood? Insanity has to be the inability to create any meaningful patterns, while something functional yet debilitating is the kind of patterns that people create who feel a void of significance in their lives.

Being communal animals, we naturally feel good when we have positive interactions with other human beings. None of us likes to feel excluded - cliques form more out of fear than anything else.

My personal interpolation in this is that I feel like a lot of boundaries that I once thought were very real between people I now think are very artificial constructions. In America, 'class' has for a long time been a bygone category - perhaps in no other country in the world does class matter so little as in the United States. In presidential campaigns, the story that one has come from a regular working class background is actually very appealing (in this case then, perhaps class still does matter in America, but certainly in a different way than it matters in France or England). Among educated people, racism has also long been debunked. The most recent movement to debunk artificial boundaries is the wonderfully vital queer/feminist movement to erase all culturally based, inherited, and ultimately arbitrary distinctions between males and females.

So what other boundaries do I now think are imaginary? The distinction between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, the distinction between introverts and extroverts, the distinction between religious and non-religious, the distinction between philosophers and poets, are examples of just a few among many others.

This is not to say that I think that such things as natural talents and natural dispositions do not exist: I know that I will never be able to act like Kate Winslett or sing like Feist. Yet I now think, to a greater extent than ever before, that we are very largely self-created. More accurately, we are very largely created by our immediate 'cultures' (parents, friends, city, county, state, country, historical era, geographic location...) and we continue on blossoming as this already-created person and at the same time use our intrapersonal and interpersonal abilities to reflect on who we are and make decisions to change those aspects of ourselves that don't fit into our ideal self-image.

Now, supposing that this is an accurate description of what we are all actively doing (from the age of 13 or so), how does the question of significance fit into it? What I have just called our 'ideal self-image' (though I admit that is a very weird phrase) is significant in itself, because we trust our imaginations enough to feel that we have an ability to imagine a state of being that is worth working towards and worth persisting in once we have achieved at least some semblance of it.

Where does our imagination get the soil for this projected ideal self? From ourself, of course, but we get our 'selves' from our culture. Culture accounts for nature in various ways: it ascribes significance to natural facts that we might still be able to understand without culture (a boy raised in the forest by wolves wouldn't experience complete chaos), but which immensely conditions our psychology when we grow up within that culture.

Sex, for example, is hard to see as a very neutral thing - certainly less neutral for humans than, say, sharing food - but culture can reduce its significance level to a great degree. Someone who grew up in a secular home where the parents talked openly about sex with their children and who didn't mind if they had premarital sex would generally ascribe a lower level of significance to sex than someone raised in a orthodox Jewish home where one is expected only to have sex with one's husband or wife and where married adult males are not allowed to even give a handshake to any other non-familial females. While even a touch on the arm is charged with sexual significance for the orthodox Jew, someone raised in the secular household might actually feel a kiss to be less sexually significant than the Jew would feel like a hug would be.

I don't think many distinctions between people are real in any meaningful way, but on a practical level, I also think that many people who were raised in very different cultures are simply incompatible with one another. I also think that they are incompatible to the degree that it would take more difficult adjustment of their sense of self than they would like to (or should) take the time to change.

The literary distinction between style and voice may be interesting to invoke here: we imagine that an author has a distinct voice that speaks consistently in all her works, though the style of each individual work may change and change drastically. Thus we might say that some people listen to the same voice or hear the same calling, and even though they have grown up in very different cultures and thus have very different styles, they might be very compatible at a very fundamental level. Changing their cultural self in order to be more compatible with this person might then be well worth the time and effort.

Does this actually happen, though? We may like to think it is true of our favorite ancient or modern but long dead authors, yet even if we very much like their work, how do we know that we would have been able to cross our cultural divides and enjoy spending time with them as a friend?

The distinction between our vocative self and our cultural self may be completely fanciful - a simplification of a phenomenon too complexly layered to be understood as a coherent whole. In any case, we find people that we are more compatible with than others and become close with them. This does not mean that we do not also want companionship with and acceptance by those who are evidently different than us - but sometimes fear prevents this connection from forming, either because fear begets disingenuousness or because fear raises up walls of resistance.

Exclusion is necessary to living a functional life - we can't be best friends with everyone. Yet when exclusion is the result of an emotionally charged and very deliberate decision, we have reason to be suspicious of why that exclusion was made. This applies also to unnecessary distinctions being made between things (and why I am trying to really question my assumptions about differences between things).

Would it be a great threat to our critical faculties if we tended to distinguish less between things? I am not sure - it doesn't seem so to me, but I have no real authority to say. All I want to get rid of are the very emotionally charged exclusions, that is, exclusions not made on the basis of our reason. We rightly exclude '2+2=5' and 'free-market capitalism is the best economic policy' because our reason tells us that they are not true, but we may exclude some new experience or curious personage from the range of our respect because we simply don't understand what their significance is for us.

Significance is very easy to grasp: hold the hand of anyone that you feel close enough to do this with. Significance is already there - there is no need to create it or invent it. But what about the patterns I spoke of earlier? Things are really just as simple as holding hands, but sometimes our patterns or ways of seeing things get in the way of the simplicity of that moment - as in the case of the orthodox Jew, who could not hold hands with someone outside his family without attaching some sexual and taboo significance to that act.

Let's think of all the things that humans naturally do:

gather food together

eat meals together

sleep together

dance/sing together

have sex with one another

show non-sexual physical or verbal affection for one another

share things with each other

help each other

give birth

say goodbye (burial rites)

These are what I was able to think of - any suggestions are more than welcome. Now, every culture does all these things in a different way. They also give different kinds of significance to each of these things.

My ideal culture would be a very communal culture where we knew all the people that we did these things with and they included more people than just our immediate family. It would also attach a very low significance to each of these things.

Now, this is my thesis: contrary to what some religious people think, lowering the cultural significance of each of these things is actually the key to allowing them to have the MOST significance, because all the significance would be given to us by the thing itself rather than by our interpretation of it. I think by attaching too much cultural significance to these things makes them taboo in a way that creates problems for people.

Now, what is petty?

Pettiness seems to me to be disrespecting one's culture and one's sense of what is ethically right for the sake of personal desires. Rape is the ultimate pettiness because a man's desires for sexual pleasure not only violate cultural standards of behavior, but actually violate the body and being of another fellow human.

Religious people have worked to fight against pettiness - and it has been a fight very praiseworthy in its intent. But its solution was to infuse things with extreme significance so that something like rape would actually feel like a divine violation along with a human violation (no one ever really feels ethical violations unless they are ingrained in cultural valuations).

The time has come to move into a new phase of moral understanding. We must reduce the spiritual significance of things to almost nothing, but simultaneously bring back the communal aspect of culture that we have lost. If we came to a point where we can hug and hold ten different people a day even for a few minutes, we would have all the significance that we could ever want.