Why theres no such thing as objective reality Greg Anderson
Transcriber:
In the next few minutes,
I hope to change the way you think about
the very nature of reality itself.
I’m not a physicist,
and I’m not a philosopher.
I’m a historian.
And after studying the ancient Greeks
and many other premodern peoples
for more than 20 years as a professional,
I’ve become convinced
that they all lived in real worlds
very different from our own.
Now, of course, you and I here today,
we take it for granted
that there’s just one
ultimate reality out there –
our reality,
a fixed universal world of experience
ruled by timeless laws
of science and nature.
But I want you to see things differently.
I want you to see that humans
have always lived in a pluriverse
of many different worlds,
not in a universe of just one.
And if you’re willing to see
this pluriverse of many worlds,
it will fundamentally change, I hope,
the way you think about the human past
and hopefully the present
and the future as well.
Now, let’s get started by asking
three basic questions
about the contents of our reality,
the real world that you and I share
right here, right now.
First of all:
What is it that makes something real
in our real world?
Well, for us, real things
are material things,
things made of matter
that we can somehow see,
like atoms, people, trees,
mountains, planets …
By the same token,
invisible, immaterial things –
like gods and demons,
heavens and hells –
these are considered unreal.
They’re simply beliefs,
subjective ideas that exist
only in the realm of the mind.
To be real,
a thing must exist objectively,
in some visible material form,
whether our minds can perceive it or not.
Second: What are the most
important things in our real world?
Answer: human things –
people, cities, societies,
cultures, government, economies.
Why is this?
Well, because we humans
think we’re special.
We think we’re the only
creatures on the planet
who have things like language,
reason, free will.
By contrast, nonhuman things, to us,
are just part of nature,
a mere backdrop to human culture,
a mere environment of things
that we feel entitled to use
however we want.
And third:
What does it mean to be a human
in our real world?
Well, it means being an individual,
a person who lives ultimately for oneself.
We think nature has made us this way,
giving each and every one of us
all of the reason, the right,
the freedom and the self-interest
to thrive and compete
with other individuals
for all of life’s important resources.
But I’m suggesting to you
that this real world of ours
is neither timeless nor universal.
It’s just one of countless
different real worlds
that humans have experienced in history.
What, then, would another world look like?
Well, let’s look at one,
the real world of the classical
Athenians in ancient Greece.
Now, of course, we usually know
the Athenians as our cultural ancestors,
pioneers of our Western traditions,
philosophy, democracy, drama
and so forth.
But their real world
was nothing like our own.
The real world of the Athenians
was alive with things
that we would consider immaterial
and thus unreal.
It pulsated with things like gods,
spirits, nymphs, Fates,
curses, oaths, souls
and all kinds of mysterious energies
and magical forces.
Indeed the most important things
in their real world
were not humans at all, but gods.
Why?
Because gods were awesome – literally.
They controlled all the things
that made life possible:
sunshine, rainfall, crop harvests,
childbirth, personal health,
family wealth,
sea voyages, battlefield victories.
There were over 200 gods in Athens,
and they were not remote,
detached divinities
watching over human affairs from afar.
They were really there,
immediately there in experience,
living in temples,
attending sacrifices,
mingling with the Athenians
at their festivals, banquets and dances.
And in the real world of the Athenians,
humans did not live apart from nature.
Their lives were dictated
by the rhythms of the seasons
and by the life cycles
of crops and animals.
Indeed the land of the Athenians itself
was not just a piece
of property or territory.
It was a goddess, a living goddess
that had once given birth
to the first Athenians
and had nurtured and cared for
all of their descendants ever since,
with her precious gifts
of soils, water, stone and crops.
Indeed, if anything should pollute
her soils with unlawful bloodshed,
it had to be expelled immediately,
beyond her boundaries,
whether it was a man, an animal
or just a fallen roof tile.
And in the real world of the Athenians,
there were no individuals.
All Athenians were inseparable
from their families,
and all Athenian families were expected
to live together and work together
as a single body,
like cells of a living organism.
They called this social body
simply “demos,” the people,
and they called their
way of life “demokratia,”
but it was nothing like
our modern democracy,
because Athenians were not born
to be individuals living for themselves.
They were born to serve and preserve
the families and the social body
that had given them life
in the first place.
In sum,
the whole Athenian way of being human
was radically different from our own.
Nature had programmed them
to live as one, as a unitary social body,
and it had designed them expressly
to coexist and collaborate
with all manner of nonhuman beings,
especially their 200 gods
and their divine earth mother.
Life in Athens was thus sustained
by what we can call a “cosmic ecology,”
a symbiotic ecology of gods,
motherland and people.
Now, of course, to us today
in our real world,
we look at their real world
and, well, it looks strange,
weird, bizarre, exotic
and, of course, unreal.
But it has many major things in common
with the real world experienced
by numerous other premodern peoples,
including, for example,
the ancient Egyptians,
ancient Chinese
and the peoples
of precolonial Peru, Mexico,
India, Bali, Hawaii.
In all of those premodern real worlds,
gods controlled all
of the conditions of existence.
Nonhumans were always expected
to collaborate with humans
and vice versa.
And humans were expected
to serve their communities,
not to live for themselves as individuals.
Indeed, in the grand scheme of history,
it’s our real world, our reality,
that is the great exception to the rule –
the exotic one, the strange one.
Only in our real world is reality itself
a purely material order.
Only in our real world are nonhumans
always subordinate to humans.
And only in our real world
are humans born to be individuals.
Why this uniqueness?
Well, because our real world
was shaped and forged
in a unique environment,
a historically unprecedented environment
in early modern Europe,
with its scientific revolution,
its enlightenment,
its novel, experimental,
capitalist way of life.
Yet, despite this uniqueness,
we just take it for granted
that our reality is the one true reality,
that all humans in history
have lived in only our real world,
whether they knew it or not.
And just think for a moment
of the colossal arrogance
of this assumption.
Basically, we’re saying, “We modern
Westerners are right about reality,
and everybody else in all of history
is wrong.”
Basically, we’re saying that all of those
extraordinary civilizations of the past
were really just lucky accidents,
because they were all founded
on nothing more
than myths, illusions
and false ideas about reality.
Why are we so certain that we’re right?
Why do we just take it for granted
that we know more?
Why do we struggle to take seriously
the real worlds of premodern peoples?
Well, because we think our modern sciences
provide the only truly objective
knowledge of reality.
But do they?
For more than a hundred years now,
the very idea of an objective reality has
been seriously and continually questioned
by experts in many different fields,
from physics and biology to philosophy.
Basically, these experts would suggest
that reality is not simply a material
order given to us by nature.
It is something that humans
actively participate in producing
when their minds interact
with their environment.
Here’s a way to think about it.
In order to make sense of experience,
every people in the past, in effect,
had to devise a model of the real world.
They would then use that model
as the basis for their whole way of life,
all of its practices,
its norms, its values.
And if that way of life proved to be
successful in practice, sustainable,
then the truth of the model
would be confirmed
by the evidence of everyday
experience: “It works!”
And thus, once the model became
internalized in mind
and baked into the environment,
the effect of a stable real world
would be generated
by ongoing interactions between the two,
between minds on the one hand,
environments on the other.
Let’s take a quick example.
Why are we so convinced
in our modern world
that we’re all, ultimately,
natural individuals?
Well, because a bunch of social scientists
in early modern Europe
decided that we were,
and because their model of a world
full of natural competitive individuals
became the basis for a new,
capitalist way of life
that generated unprecedented
levels of wealth –
at least for the lucky few –
and because all of us who’ve been raised
in capitalist nations ever since
have been continually socialized
to be individuals by our families,
our schools and our societies,
and because we are treated
precisely as individuals
almost every day of our lives
by the structures
which control those lives,
like our liberal democracy
and our capitalist economy.
In other words,
our minds and our environment
continually conspire
to make our individuality
seem entirely natural.
In sum:
no human being has ever experienced
a truly objective reality.
Different peoples have always
experienced different realities,
each one shaped by whatever
model of the world
happened to be embedded
in minds and environment at the time.
In other words,
humans have always lived in a pluriverse
of many different real worlds,
not in a universe of just one.
Let me close with three thoughts
that follow from this conclusion.
First of all,
we modern Westerners need to stop
thinking that all premodern peoples
are somehow more primitive
or less enlightened than ourselves.
Their real world, with all their gods
and magical forces,
were just as real as our own.
Indeed, those real worlds
anchored ways of life that sustained
the lives of multitudes
for hundreds, sometimes
thousands, of years.
Their real worlds were different;
they were not wrong.
Second:
we modern Westerners
need to get over ourselves.
(Laughter)
We need to be a little more humble.
For all of its extraordinary
technological accomplishments,
our brave new modern real world
has imperiled the whole future
of the planet in barely 300 years.
It’s made possible
all manner of historical horrors:
genocides across entire continents,
mass exploitation of colonized peoples,
industrial servitude,
two disastrous world wars,
the Holocaust,
nuclear warfare,
species extinctions,
environmental degradation,
factory farming
and, of course, global warming.
The evidence is there
if you want to see it.
Our model of reality has failed
catastrophically in practice.
Third:
other models and other
real worlds are possible.
Other worlds are being lived
right now, as we speak,
in what remains of history’s pluriverse,
in places like Amazonia,
the Andes, Southern Mexico,
Northern Canada, Australia
and all the other places where
Indigenous peoples are struggling
to preserve their highly sustainable
ancestral ways of life
to prevent them being destroyed
by modernity’s ever-expanding universe.
I suggest that all of these
nonmodern peoples past and present
have so much to teach us
about living more sustainable lives
in other possible worlds.
So let’s start right now
to try to learn from them
before it’s too late.
Let’s try to magnify our imaginations.
Let’s start to imagine other
possible ways of being human
in other possible worlds.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)