I recently received an email from a new reader ("Greg") who expressed appreciation for some of the articles he has read at Dangerous Intersection. I decided to share my response to his letter (see the bottom of this post).
This website has been important for me as a tool for me for trying to understand the world around me. It has not been entirely successful, of course, and never will be. The world is a inherently confusing moving target, making the quest to understand an ongoing project. It is also a complex adaptive system that demands multi-layer analysis. It's a big onion that requires exploration involving constant reframings based on both reductionism and emergence. Further complicating things, the tools we can use for understanding, spoken and written language, can only scratched the surface of our world. I have been increasingly expressing my frustration with this mismatch between our language and our quest for understanding by focusing on the "meaning of meaning." It's not that we can't make progress, but we often have to be satisfied (if we are honest) with what Nietzsche refers to in this "five fingers" reference:
Just beyond experience!-- Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.
--from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 564, R.J. Hollingdale transl
Greg's email served as another reminder to me (this has become a constant topic for me) of the intersection between group dynamics and truth. I would bet that I've written about this intersection on dozens of occasions here at this website, The problem being illustrated by
Solomon Asch's classic social science experiment.
Greg, thanks for your email, and welcome to this website. I look forward to your comments, especially when you disagree!
Thanks for reaching out. It delights me when I receive letters like yours. My site started off almost like a personal journal about 15 years ago and I often write about topics as my own personal effort to figure things out rather than to tell other people how to think. It's also been a good tool for me to help me remember and organize my thoughts. Otherwise, information pores into my head and then seems to leak right back out.
It has long been my belief that Group labels (e.g. "Christian") disguise the fact that within each labeled group there are millions of disparate people, some of them having very little in common with the others, even though it seems like they are all homogenous when you see them together in the pews on Sunday. In other words, I don't think there's any alternative – we all have to figure it out ourselves in the end. Good luck to you in your own personal project, and good for you to recognize that there's no substitute for hard work when it comes to figuring out anything important. Let me know when you finish your book. And yes, that would be good to have a cup of coffee someday once the vaccine starts doing its work in a big way.
If you choose to take the time to read through these five articles, I would very much be interested in hearing what you think about them. I don't often see my approach expressed by other people, although more recently I have been increasingly influenced by the writings of David Sloan Wilson, on the coupled topic of religion and evolution.
Again, thanks for reaching out!
Erich