Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. (Sun-Tzu)
Locked by Birth into Singular Perspectives
We are all mortal beings, born into a precarious life that must be defended, if it is not to be lost.
We must continually win our survival, pitted against the long arm of natural selection, until death do us part.
We cannot help but view the world as would survival-machines, for survival is the indispensable condition of our existence.
Noteworthy exceptions: the sheltered nestlings of the affluent classes in affluent nations. But this inherited condition comes with its own risks and pitfalls and, anyway, it seldom lasts a lifetime.
So, we lean into surviving. Or we don’t survive.
So, we support loyally those that helped us survive. We take for granted the goodness of all that helped us survive and thrive — the people, partners, family, friends and allies, and the customs, traditions and institutions as well.
We all want to preserve all that preserved us, even when that came at the expense of others.
Friends and foes is the first political distinction recognized by survival-machines.
And it persists — in disguised forms — even in the thoughtful, even in those who have worked to broaden their horizons (i.e, liberals).
Postmodernists call this perspective a grand narrative, claiming, correctly, that it pervades every culture, every cultural institution and every mind.
How could we not take for granted the conditions under which we flourished, under whose shelter we received, developed or strove to achieve all that makes us what we are: our personalities, our personal histories, our social networks, our careers and achievements?
If conditions were favorable to our flourishing, we owe them a great debt; this is the basis of family feelings and blood obligations.
If conditions were unfavorable, we look for the obstacles that inhibited us and attack them with all our force. (This is the peephole from which many postmodernists take their bearing.)
Those are the extreme cases, but most origins fall into the middle range, the range of mixed blessings.
In sum, individual perspectives are inescapably shaped by our peculiar circumstances, producing perspectives at least as various as the conditions that shaped them.
What, then, can truth be? If, indeed, it is anything at all?
The Origin of Perspective
But no perspective, standing alone, is reality or truth.
Truth must either reject all perspectives by superseding them all, or comprehend them all by incorporating all of them — more precisely, all of them that can accommodate other legitimate perspectives.
This works much in the way that journalists, detectives, and researchers sift and validate eyewitness accounts, by using methodical procedures, governed by rules.
Where possible, we should use explicit methods and procedures that can be reduplicated for confirmation or falsification, as in the scientific method.
But methods and procedures are their own keyholes, for conditions must meet certain requirements before they can be applied.
A crucial example of this is the scientific method, which applies most readily to objects whose movements are accounted for entirely by causes externalized in space and time, rather than objects engineered internally — and thus, locally and individually — to process external inputs of forces or itsensory stimuli in ways whose traits are determined by locally established types: species, psychological profiles, or the massive processing of internalized data (as in human experience and the incorporation and processing of massive data sets in Large Language Models (LLMs), the current vogue in AI.
Such local centers of ordered change — identities, one might call them — can be produced by natural selection, advanced natural cognition or the simulated cognition of the emerging deeper AI.
Blinded by Perspective
Most perspectives assume that the truth supersedes all mere perspectives.
They further assume that their inherent perspective is no mere perspective but the truth entire.
And, if they even bother to consider what their “truth” looks like to every other perspective — namely, just another mere perspective different from their own truth — they find ways to discredit all other claims, exhibiting healthy doses of confirmation bias as they do so.
They do this with little or no justification. And they all, or nearly all, do it.
How can one ever escape the trap of perspective?
The Outsider Perspective
The most readily occurring way is to stumble into the outsider perspective.
This can occur in ways that are idiosyncratic, like the daimon of which Socrates speaks in the Republic ( Book VI, 496a-e) or of the socially withdrawn or aspirational types depicted in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger or James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Or it can arise from the outsider status of ethnic or other minorities, as in the pre-WWII writings of the Jewish-born Kafka or the wartime resistance activities of the White Rose network, whose members’ religious affiliations were overwhelmingly with minorities in predominantly Protestant Germany.
Yet outsider perspectives can become just as insular and blinding as mainstream ones.
Two Paths to Escape
Beyond the outsider perspective, a largely involuntary response to exclusion and discrimination, I know of two other ways to escape the limitations of perspective, orthodoxy and dogma.
First, disillusionment with ideological fervor born of successive conversions. Like the outsider perspective, this too is an accident of history. But, for disillusionment to occur, one must at least have some kind of built-in bullshit-detector that lots of people lack, as exposed by today’s social media and their unforeseen but destabilizing consequences.
Soapbox Interlude
And to think, technophiles initially foresaw a new era of spreading enlightenment enabled by easy access to all of mankind’s knowledge. They forgot to consider that lies spread faster than truths in the rumor mill, and that the viral characteristics of mass communication — partly just the age-old social accelerant called gossip, partly the techno-profit engine of algorithmssensitive to the viral potential of thoughtlessly virulent posts — magnifythe distorting effects of the age-old rumor mill, effectively putting it on steroids.
The truth of the Internet is this:
Those who use it intelligently, as humanity’s most accessible research tool, will grow and prosper,
while those who use it as an amplifier for biases and prejudices and as a platform for misinformed ignorance and spite, frothing at the mouth and flaming in the cloud — will first, damage society as a whole, and then condemn themselves to ever-increasing irrelevance.
For their refusal to adapt makes them less and less fit for the knowledge economy just now revealing its real potential.
Irrelevant, but dangerous.They are a large and powerful near-majority, able to slow down needed change, and — in their recurring short-sighted isolationism — either run the ship of state aground or make it much more brutal and costly to salvage the geopolitical mess they are on the verge of leaving to us… and to their children.
This is not the time to sit on the fence and count up short-term gains or costs.
If you have a vote, use it now, and use it wisely, with your eyes on the long-term consequences.Run-of-the-mill politicos, old fogeys, even, come and go, but it takes a divisive demagogue to ruin a republic.
And, now, off my soapbox and back to my topic.
Dialogue and Dialectic: Multiple Perspectives in Dramatic Form
The second, more general and more procedural escape from the limitations of perspective is the discovery of the multi-perspectival processes of dialogue or dialectic.
The dialogue form can be a facade, of course.True dialogue must be dialectical in both form and substance.There are no shortcuts, no royal road, to real dialectical examination of the interplay of thesis and antithesis, of hypotheses and alternatives.
It’s hard work, and the pitfalls are legion. There may be no perfectly perspective-free perspective. We are, after all, limited finite and mortal beings, not gods.
Yet dialogue and dialectic both preserve opposed perspectives as they present and examine controversies.
Each begins by acknowledging that persuasion — and any chance of the emergence of consensual truth — must address all perspectives willing to submit to open debate and rational scrutiny.
It is similar to the consensus — the agreement to disagree, but to find common ground for forward movement, nonetheless — that well-constructed republics require in order to act in unison, united behind policies to which all have consented, at least procedurally.
Policies, in a balanced and functional republic, can split the difference between distinct interests, by finding a middle position, by balancing trade-offs between disparate interests, by sharing the spoils or by uniting against the threat of a common enemy.
Dialectical thinking, by contrast, must preserve incompatible perspectives within its discourse, in something like the alternative branches that arrive at different outcomes within a flow-chart.
Dialectical thinking must retain incompatibles and unresolved issues, incorporating them within its all-encompassing flow-chart of possible lines of thought.
This will include both the defensible lines of thought and the dead ends, because knowledge crucially includes knowledge learned from prior mistakes.
It will also include junctions which alternative lines of plausible argument leave undecided.
Aristotle called such junction points aporeia (undecidables), such as the one in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he considers the different senses in which we can be said to have choice and not to have it. His point there is twofold: 1) neither opposed answer by itself fully captures the matter, and 2) whichever way we answer the question changes the ethical dilemmas of a thing not at all, so it doesn’t matter for practical purposes.
Kant’s most noteworthy preservation of incompatible perspectives are the four antinomies (literally, anti-laws, by which he means paired and offsetting proofs using reductio ad absurdum (i.e., assuming the contrary thesis and exposing it as self-contradictory).
The 3rd of Kant’s antinomies is the very same aporeia of Aristotle’s mentioned above. (The other three are: 1st) that time and space are bounded/unbounded, 2nd) that matter is/isn’t reducible to simplest parts, and 4th) that there does/does not exist an absolutely necessary being (i.e., God).
Self-Image & Social Standing
If the survival-machine in man is dangerously limited in its perspective, so is the social ape in him.
We are social animals, our survival dependent upon the success of our troop — competing with other troops and other species for scarce resources — and upon our standing within our troop.
The inner reflection of social standing is self-image.
Self-image is a double challenge, to accurately appraise our world and our standing within that world. We can be wrong on either account.
Social standing and self-image matter to all social animals –they set the pecking order, among other things, and together they determine our ability to access resources,to gain allies and to pass on our culture, history and genes to succeeding generations.
But for beings able to think abstractly, to ponder what is not currently present to the senses and to imagine altered futures, making plans to bring them about, self-image assumes an even more commanding role than social standing. Outsiders, though generally at a disadvantage, sometimes upset the apple cart, becoming the new masters of new states or industries or cultural fashions.
New allegiances and alliances build upon blood ties and trials of brute strength to realign, in great part, around shared beliefs about the nature of the world we live in, and to attempts to capture that nature in systematic observation and analysis of the world, and of how best to conduct ourselves in it.
Put differently, culture is a shared communal self-image built upon learned competencies and knowledge.
Between them, society-wide culture and personal self-image add new levels of organization — anthropological, historical, sociological and psychological — variable structures atop the invariable structures of physics and chemistry, where universal laws control identical units, both simple and complex, as well as the halfway house of biology, where local environments and distinctive species lineages matter.
“Different strokes for different folks” is my half-jesting summary of human cultures and the social sciences that probe them, where perspective is ineradicable.
Biology, the middle way, is deterministic in the mechanisms of genetics, while natural selection can never be reduced further than the opposed perspectives of predator and prey — or, more generally, of competition for scarce resources.
And resources are perpetually scarce among all organisms in need of the same resources, because biological organisms reproduce and colonize to their limits, a continuation of the self-replication that sets in motion the chain-reaction of biology.
Conclusion
I conclude then that perspective is endemic to the big picture biological aspect of natural selection, and far more so to the big and kaleidoscopic picture of competing cultures, and of individuals within cultures competing for that culture’s resources and social standing.
That being the case, my position is this: truth must incorporate all perspectives defensible in open dialogue and able to withstand critical scrutiny.
Bar this, and thought can never be more than discord (the world as seen by postmodernists and by those who disparage the core desiderata of the Enlightenment).
Bar this, and communication and conciliation can never be more than a temporary armistice in the rhetorical war of words, each successive provisional consensus simply setting the terms for the next outbreak of war.
Bar this, and action can never be more than war (or the maneuverings of future belligerents in preparation for war during unstable armistices).
Bar this, and the future of humanity holds nothing but more of the same, as reflected in history and captured in realism.
There must be common ground, however multi-faceted and multi-perspectival, if the survival-machine and social ape homo sapiens is to avoid self-extinction, one prong of the fork in mankind’s destiny foreseen by Kant in Perpetual Peace.
But he foresaw another prong as well.
Our future is a choice that we will, collectively, make or — by failing to make a deliberate choice — make by default as we slide by degrees to our doom.
We will then be like the fabled frog who, never noticing the gradual rise in temperature of the stewpot in which it sits, does nothing until it is boiled alive.
Through a glass darkly, and through a keyhole narrowly.
But like many human behaviors, outward appearances are more habits than deliberative behavior.
For example, virtue signaling rampant on both Right and Left in the cultures wars, is an exchanged protocol, something like the watchwords military guards demand to tell friend from foe.
The most obvious forms of virtue signaling are slogans, but whole lines of argument, if repeated as an unquestioned orthodoxy, work much the same way, if on a more sophisticated level.
Thinking is hard. It’s uneconomic. It’s seldom the ticket to near-term social success.
That depends on:
Fitting in with your social group (whether inherited or chosen), so as to be a member in good standing
Shaping that group from within, so as to become a leader, with all the benefits that brings, and it always brings benefits.
Fitting in
Some become leaders by offering real benefits, solving problems the group faces or finding new ways for the group to prosper.
Some become leaders by fashioning protocols to which the group is receptive. These need neither solve a problem nor find new ways to prosper.
So the ambitious are always motivated to become leaders for the personal benefits, whether or not they can solve problems or bring prosperity.
But at least those who offer real benefits offer benefits to the group (or at least part of it — the part sufficient to bring them to power) in exchange for the personal benefits they get.
And though good leaders may well be motivated by a vison of the common good, still, in order to attain the power to effect that, they must offer more direct benefits to those whose support they need to get that power.
So, power must always be sufficiently self-serving to remain in power, regardless of ultimate motives. That’s called politics.
Still, better a rightly motivated leader who offers real benefits than one offering empty symbols, pseudo-solutions or short-term benefits outweighed by long-term costs.
We will have rational politics if and when voters in general can tell the difference.
And not until then.
Beyond Protocols, 1st Pass
Can human beings ever get beyond protocols? If you listen to postmodernists and anti-foundationalists, no. That’s what all their talk of deconstructing grand narratives is about.
They seem not to notice that this reduces all questions touching upon moral and ethical values to mere rhetoric. Those who value different kinds of things have no common ground, no shared experience, no shared terminology to draw on for reasonable agreement, for their perspectives, by this account, are absolutely incommensurable.
The only values that would survive the postmodernist assault would be those that are instrumental and measurable relative to arbitrary ends.
If you want X, Y is the right means to that end. If you want speed, a Formula-1 car is better than a stock car.
By this account, the only values that can be shared in any sense are those of the marketplace. All other values are culturally specific; cultures can only clash over values not shared except within the culture.
All other values are relative to your perspective and your belief-system, however arbitrary or idiosyncratic. (I’m all for individuality and diversity, but within a rational framework, like that, broadly, of the Enlightenment.)
The view that values are beyond reasonable dialogue between rational beings with divergent perspectives, when coupled with the belief that any perspective is as good as any other, is called moral relativism; when coupled with the view that there is but one correct view, and that all divergent views are abominations — idolatry or heresy in sectarian terminology, corruption or false consciousness in ideological terminology — is called moral absolutism, or fanaticism or zealotry.
This belief can only lead to a world even uglier than the one we have now. Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations draws a picture of how that plays out between civilizational societies. Culture wars demonstrate how it plays out within societies.
Culture wars result when extremists on either side, unwilling to acknowledge any possible common ground for negotiation or compromise, force the moderate middle to take sides, polarizing society.
Institutional deformities that overrepresent some while underrepresenting others add fuel to the fire. Too few swing districts and too many safe districts (whether natural or gerrymandered) harden positions, fills representative bodies with agents who benefit politically from taking extreme positions, while making the society polarized and dysfunctional.
The kneejerk dismissal of anything deemed politically incorrect (left wing cancel culture)– is as bad as the kneejerk dismissal of expertise (right-wing anti-intellectualism).
Beyond Protocols, 2nd Pass
Can there ever be a common ground, rationally accessible to all human beings, upon which persons with differing perspectives can agree on some values and negotiate others?
This question runs parallel to the controversy of free will versus determinism, for we’re asking whether our thinking is entirely rooted in cultural protocols viewed as causes that determine our perspectives before rationality has made its first move or whether there is some sense, however limited, in which we can reason together as human beings about what values we have in common.
My short answer is that we can whenever the protocol adopted as a standard moves beyond the arbitrarily cultural to a self-enforcing system of procedures, rules or methods for determining what counts as true within that system.
Logic, mathematics, and the scientific method are examples of such systems, though they do not and cannot, of themselves, generate moral values.
Languages, legal systems, games are more culturally arbitrary systems, but if you want to speak in that language, live unpunished within that legal system or play that game, you must follow its rules and procedures as long as you are “in” the game.
Professional standards and codes of conduct are somewhat looser systems whose rules are less codified, more a matter of judgment, but still significant. You find these in medicine, law and journalism, in each of which there is a mainstream of reputable practitioners and a fringe of disreputable ones. Caveat emptor.
Contracts are form of defined frameworks within which the parties who sign on to it must follow the agreed-to conditions or forfeit whatever benefits they were promised under the contract.
And that brings us to the social contract, the key Enlightenment idea of a universal basis for consensual participation in a shared legal system.
Having referenced that big idea, we have hardly solved all our problems, since views as different as those of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau can all be united under that one label. These three versions emphasize, power, rights, and popular will, respectively — and those are important differences.
Procedural justice — exemplified by election results and jury verdicts, by legislatures and courts — relies on procedural consensus within a legal framework founded upon a social contract.
I would suggest that the best form of the social contract centers on rights, while working within the limits of the two forms of power, that of the acting sovereign and that of the people. In other words, rights are the moral basis of the social contract, but rights without power are impotent. So, any durable vehicle for delivering rights must work within limits set by the existing distribution of power.
For example, women’s rights are not currently supportable in Afghanistan nor civil liberties in Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China.
Criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes from the social contract perspective rather than the realist perspective.
Strict realists recognized that Russia (a great power, in decline, with no ideology beyond geopolitical realism) was likely to react as it did to attempts to pull Ukraine into the West’s sphere of influence.
Social contractarians recognized that neither Russia nor Russia’s invasion conform to any lawful social contract.
Overall, it is the appeal to a sharable framework of procedures, rules or methods that makes possible a rational consensus across differing perspectives. Outside of that, it is as the postmodernists say, or worse, the absolutists. Neither of them can offer more than the perpetual clash of civilizations.
When All Is Said and Dunn 