Adapted from Cutural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future
With regard to contemporary philosophical/social viewpoint, the shift in understanding described by Culturally Maturity and embodied in the thinking of CST is most readily tied to three common general perspectives—post-modernism, social relativism, and pragmatism. Appreciating similarities and differences sheds useful light on what CST attempts to achieve.
Almost (But Not Quite)
Philosophy is our common initial association when it comes to thinking about truth itself. Cultural Maturity proposes that philosophy as we have tended to use the term can’t fully get us where we want to go. (It notes, for example, how philosophy’s reliance on rationality ultimately limits it.) And we can’t forget that philosophical thought is as vulnerable to absurdity as thought of any other sort. (Cicero observed that “There is nothing so ridiculous that some philosopher hasn’t said it.”) But such limits noted, three threads in contemporary thought—in philosophy and more broadly in the humanity’s and social sciences—provide particularly useful vantage for getting at what mature truth is about (and not) and finding language.
The first—post-modern perspective—has a special relationship to Transitional dynamics. The other two, pragmatism and social relativism, have particular pertinence respectively to the “crux” and “multiplicity” aspects of mature truth. Each of these three threads, at least in its common application, leave us short of fully mature understanding. But for our task, that is not a problem. We can learn as much or more from what each formulation may lack as how it contributes.
Post-modern is an imprecise term—not just with regard to its definition but also with regard to what and who we should include in its purview. For some the term refers most simply to a time (roughly the last half of the twentieth century), for others to a broad social and esthetic movement (I’ve made reference to post-modernism in architecture), and for others to particular schools of philosophy. Indeed there is debate about what time we are talking about. In philosophy, social constructivism is unquestionably post-modern. But existentialism, with its roots a hundred years previous, is often given similar status.
However the inclusion debate is resolved, those two threads—existentialism and social constructivism—provide good reference for comparison with Cultural Maturity’s perspective. I’ve proposed that the post-modern argument’s (considerable) contribution to the conversation about truth lies with how clearly it articulates our times’ loss of guideposts. I’ve also argued that its great weakness lies with how little it gives us to replace such loss. Existentialism and social constructivism help fill out these assertions from slightly different angles.
Existentialism, most influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (in Europe, and in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States) questioned the existence of objective truth of all kinds—philosophical, religious, social, and scientific. (Existentialist ideas were foreshadowed in the thinking of Frederick Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard and made explicit in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Albert Camus, and others.) Its thinkers proposed that meaning is to be found not in the discovery of answers, but in the courageous engagement of a world without guidelines. I think of John Paul Sartre’s famous assertion that “Man is condemned to be free.”
I locate existentialist thought right at the threshold of the new maturity—a location that explains both the richness of its contributions and its limitations. Existentialist thinkers describe with particular eloquence the psychological precipice we stand at with the loss of familiar absolutes. The shortcomings of existentialist thought derive from its inability to help us in more than the most limited way with making sense of what may lie beyond it. Given their time in history, existentialists have been predictably better at critique than illumination, better at articulating what no longer is adequate than what may lie ahead.
Social constructivism, a loose body of work that gained prominence in the 1970’s and 80’s (With the ideas of Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and others.) emphasizes the dependency of beliefs on cultural context. A constructivist perspective replaces the idea that truth is an objective “out there,” something to be discovered, with the idea that we, together as social beings, “construct” truth. Depending on the absoluteness of the view, truth can mean primarily social convention or can refer to everything—including the chair on which you sit. Constructivist thinkers emphasize the existence of multiple worldviews, talk about there being not one truth but many.
Social constructivists tend to be immediately skeptical toward anything that might look like overarching conception (even though one might argue that theirs is such), a characteristic Jean-Francois Lyotard described as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” (Richard Rorty proposes, “There is no big picture.”) From a constructivist perspective, there are no universal theories, only local theories, truths specific to particular times and places.
This fundamental skepticism is the source of social constructivism’s great strengths as well as its often major blindnesses. Constructivists eloquently articulate how we map makers are never wholly separable from our maps. And their ideas shed important light on the value to be gained from appreciating the contrasting perceptual and conceptual realities embedded in differences such as gender, age, and cultural background.
But at once, the notion that truth is constructed often comes close to being an assertion that truth is arbitrary. People’s beliefs become inventions born from little more than whims of power or shifting tastes. The best of constructivist thinkers do not claim that one reality is as good as another and are careful to point this out. But Cultural Maturity sees social constructivism, even at is best, as deeply limited by that “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Social constructivism’s suspiciousness toward big-picture ideas has admirable roots—getting beyond cultural absolutes is no easy task. But its knee-jerk dismissing of such ideas easily discards the baby with the bathwater, dismisses the guidance that overarching perspective can offer exactly when it is needed most. (The Creative Function helps us understand how this would be predicted. The loss traditional beliefs explains only part of it. In addition, Transition’s absence of a creative Lower Pole (any connection with the ground of being) makes it difficult to understand multiplicity as anything more than randomly scattered parts. Absent the sensitivity to interconnectedness provided by the creative Lower Pole’s more unitary esthetic, we tend either to dismiss questions of pattern or entertain pattern of only the most trivial sort.)
From the perspective of Cultural Maturity, the post-modern contribution takes us just up to the existential threshold—and, at its best, in the argument for finding meaning in a world without obvious meaning and an eclecticism of esthetic, a small step beyond it. But by itself, it can only be a beginning.
Pragmatism has formal philosophical roots (uniquely American roots—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas of Charles Pierce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Dewey), but its basic meaning has become part of common usage. It comes at truth from the bare-boned, “crux,” concern of what truth looks like stripped of ideology. Pragmatism argues that we retain particular beliefs less because they are true in some stand-alone sense than because they get us where we need to go.
It intersects with Culturally Maturity most directly with regard to mature truth’s “ordinariness.” Mythologized truth is dramatic—romantic, heroic, claiming of the absolute. Integrative truth is “just what works”—this in a culturally mature reality. Our beliefs may help us find what works. And we craft new beliefs in response to what works. But from the perspective of Cultural Maturity, beliefs are in the end tools, ways of thinking and acting that if used well move us toward what matters.
The often controversial and always influential legal philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes had its foundation in pragmatism. Holmes asserted that “the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.” Such was not to side with feelings as opposed to facts. Rather it was to argue that, often as not, judges make decisions first and come up with the legal rationale later. Moreover, he argued that this is exactly as it should be. While necessarily imprecise, anything else makes justice unacceptably vulnerable to narrow interpretations and legal dogmatisms.
When teaching, Holmes would often start by asking students to cite a legal quandary and propose the most pertinent legal principle. Holmes would then proceed to use that principle to argue both sides of the case. Holmes’ point was not that legal argument was capricious—he valued legal argument immensely—but that it was only part of the way good judges made decisions. In the end, judges decide on the basis of their best sense of what is just—within the constraints of the law—given all the complexity of apples and oranges factors that may be involved. They derive help from legal principles, most often more than one. And they certainly use the decisions they reach to refine their use of legal principles. But the best of judges don’t confuse legal principle with truth. Holmes agued that legal truth’s bottom line should be, and in fact with law at its best always had been, what has the greatest potential to work—for the individuals directly involved and for society as a whole.
Cultural Maturity affirms in a similar way that effective future decision-making must be based on practicality rather than ideology. Practicality and ideology do not wholly contradict. I’ve argued that ideology has been an abbreviated language for practicality, and clashing ideologies have always played an important role in change. But over-simplified beliefs and clashing ideologies tend increasingly to leave us immobilized and ever-more distanced from workable truth.
At the same time, culturally mature perspective argues that pragmatism—at least at its most simplistic—has a gaping flaw. Too often it begs that critical Question of Referent. It is a solid step forward to say that truth is “what works.” But we haven’t gained much—indeed have made ourselves open to harmful consequences—if we’ve left unanswered “works toward what end?”
This flaw is no small matter. Fail to address it and pragmatism can be used to support most any conclusion. Make our referent undiluted power, and pragmatism becomes justification for a narrowly Machiavellian ethos. Make it wealth alone and both generosity and truthfulness become threats to success. At the least, we are left vulnerable to driving off in unhelpful directions.
More formal explications of pragmatism often avoid this trap with regard to daily decision-making. But they tend not to find a way past it with regard to truth more broadly. Richard Rorty put it this way in The Consequences of Pragmatism: “[Pragmatists] see certain acts as good ones to perform under the circumstances, but doubt that there is anything general and useful to say about what makes them all good.”
A culturally mature pragmatism requires us to examine the feedback we use to determine if something does in fact work—and ultimately at both of these levels. It is right that we should strive to succeed and to avoid failure. Culturally mature pragmatism simply adds, “but what is success, and what does it mean to fail?” Most important for the challenges of today, it must effectively address just what success and failure mean in a culturally mature reality.
Our third contribution from contemporary thought shifts our attention from “crux” to “multiplicity” concerns. Another way to talk of today’s new truth is to say that it is relative. Social relativism comes at questions of truth from the perspective of context and complexity. Its interest lies with how truth differs depending on when and where we find it. Such relativity is an important theme in most all the modern humanities and social sciences—not just philosophy, but also literature, psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics. The term also finds usage in casual discourse.
Relativism observes that every aspect of experience is at some level contextual. Even at the level of our biological natures our sense of the world is much less unbiased than we might assume. Perception is very selective and very species specific. We evolve not to see, hear, and taste what is true in some absolute sense, but to perceive in the specific ways that will most support our unique approach to survival. The perceptual world of a dog, a bee, a bear, or an amoeba is much different from our own. And while we reflexively assume our reality is most sophisticated, if I were lost in the woods with only the scent of my previous steps to guide me home, the perceptual reality of the dog or the bear would offer much more sensitive and useful truth.
The most obvious aspects of our more specifically human relativity are those that are products of conditioning—of our great capacity to learn. The beliefs we grow up with in our families color our perceptions. And cultural traditions and mores prescribe, or at least suggest, answers to truth’s quandaries—from the everyday to the transcendent. Indeed, every moment of experience makes my life different from yours—and the more various our experiences the greater those differences will be. Our immense capacities to adapt, learn, and grow mean that, to a degree not present with other creatures, what I see and what you see may not be the same.
In these pages, we’ve given special attention to a further level of relativity that is even more specific to being human. I’ve described how the ways we perceive and conceive are products not just of our physical selves and of simple conditioning, but also of the very different ways various ones of us, at various times, may live in our human natures. We’ve looked at how differences in the sensibilities we bring to experience—for example, by virtue of cultural state or personality style—fundamentally alter what we see. With this added aspects of contextual relativity, the phrase “where you are coming from” takes on a newly concrete and consequential meaning.
As with the language of pragmatism, we need to be careful with relativity as a perspective. If what we mean is the anything goes, different-strokes-for-different folks worldview we find popularly associated with the term, we have gained little. Indeed we easily perpetrate harm. To claim that one opinion is as valid as the next is to abdicate moral conviction at just the time when moral conviction is most critically needed. Culturally mature relativism calls for greater discernment, not less. (And we can just as readily fall off the other side of the conceptual roadway. If our relativities become only new taxonomies, further categories of the old mechanistic sort, at the least we’ve failed to address the Dilemma of Differentiation. We may also, if we are not careful, end up just replacing one set of biases and bigotries with another.)
But a deep appreciation for context, for how what is true in one situation may not be in another (how different things become pragmatic at particular times and places) is pivotal to mature thought. Cultural Maturity makes truth’s relativities newly tolerable and understandable (even fascinating). Again, in the end, nothing is new. Truth has always been contextual. But our ability to recognize just how far such relativity extends is new, and could not be more significant.
Each of these three vantages captures an important pieces of truth from the perspective of maturely integrative understanding. Culturally mature truth becomes a courageously delineated post-modernism. It is about surrendering absolutes—and at once about seeking to understand underlying pattern and coherence. We could also think of it as a meaning-centered pragmatism. It is about getting at what is most basic, at “what works”—while never losing sight of that question, “works toward what end?” And just as much, it is an aware and differentiated relativism. It is about loving the endless intricacies and contextualities of experience—and, at once, about bringing deep integrity and a keen eye to how we choose between options.