Certain illusions give us hope and help us to imagine the world as a brighter place. And like Dr Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, it is comforting to imagine that we live in “best of all possible worlds”.
In this instance, let us ponder the significance of Blaise Pascal’s famous wager as outlined in his important philosophical treatise, Pensee. He argues that even from a sceptical position, one should accept the existence of God, if for no other reason, than that a world without the belief in God would be hopeless and absurd. In other words, it is preferable to cling to the illusion that God exists because if we deny his existence the world risks becoming a darker place.
Likewise, people often put an unreasonable spin on stories to favour themselves. Often, they are just making their world a brighter place. Hollywood happy endings, like the illusory American dream, give people hope.
Perspectives of Jesus differ: some scholars draw a distinction between the historical and the mythological Jesus: Jesus the man and Jesus the Christ.
According to Reza Aslan,(The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth) there is a difference between James’s (Jesus’s brother’s) vision of Jesus and that of Paul (a successor who never knew Jesus personally.) James and Jesus’s immediate band of followers (up until 70 A.D.) inherited Jesus’s vision of a religion anchored in the Law of Moses; his religious beliefs are those of a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, who challenged the Jewish priesthood, and lost. Paul’s vision of Roman religion, which was more readily adopted by second and third generations of Jesus’s followers, divorced Christianity from a narrow Jewish focus on the law and the authority of the Temple; Aslan states, their vision “requires nothing for salvation except a belief in Christ”. The selection of letters in the New Testament reflects this struggle between James and Paul for authority; it shows a bias towards Paul. Specifically, the New Testament consists of one letter from James, the brother and successor of Jesus and 14 letters from Paul, the “deviant and outcast who was rejected and scorned by the leaders in Jerusalem”. Clearly, the religious, political and social context in which Paul lived, favoured the mythical and spiritual version over the historical Jesus, brother of James.
The role of language
Playwright Harold Pinter laments “a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies”.
Author Salman Rushdie asks, “does reality remain essentially outside language, not susceptible to description”? “Or is that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality, because we fear it?”
In his acceptance speech (as the winner of the 2014 PEN/Pinter Award) Rushdie asserts that the “mangling of language” makes tyranny possible. The “deformed medievalist language of fanaticism”; the “‘hate-filled religious rhetoric” has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today .
The role of memory in shaping (and fabricating) realities
If all conscious experiences can be thought of as what Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman calls a “remembered present”, then the way we remember impacts upon how we see ourselves and our place in the world.
The process of remembering often casts us in the role of narrator as we seek to make sense of and order our memories. As Michael Frayn suggests, our memories are often a “collection of vivid particulars” consisting of a kaleidoscope of ingredients: “certain words, objects glimpsed, moods, gestures, expressions”. Often the subject searches for the hidden links, which suggests that the person who digs into memories is cast into the role of the narrator.
We must ask, what makes the route different?
As Michael Leunig says, when “it’s about a loss of dignity, the memory plays tricks and makes everything soft and cloudy; it’s a protective thing.” (24) We often, distort, magnify or exaggerate elements of the past to suit our self image. Paradoxically, remembering is also a process of forgetting the inconvenient or painful events or uncomfortable experiences.
No matter the emotive colour attached to our memories, generally the way we select, organise and (re)construct our memories will have a bearing on our mental stability. Typically, we spin things in our favour to preserve our integrity and dignity.
Professor David Gallo, psychologist and director of the Memory Research Laboratory at the University of Chicago, says “we do have a lot of control” – at least over our own memories. Experiments show that if, after experiencing something, we retell it, reimagine it or repeat it, this “basically gives the brain another chance to encode it” and that will make the memory stronger. “It’s not so much what we do in the initial event,” he says, “but the reviewing. For example, bringing out family slides and everybody looking at them and reminiscing. You’re selectively rehearsing that information and reconsolidating it, so that later on you’ll be more likely to retrieve it.”
Reviewing not only cements the memory, it can also change it. “When you retrieve that memory, it reawakens that memory,” says Gallo. “That memory is now in a labile or malleable state where, depending on how you embellish or think about that event, you can set down another memory trace that is then remembered as part of the original. It then becomes very difficult to differentiate the two. If the way you are thinking about the memory the second time is different than the way it happened the first time, it’s a way to potentially introduce biases or distortions in how we remember.”
Willy Loman spins reality to accord with his vision of Dave Singleman, a successful salesman. He wants to believe that he is following in his footsteps. (After the affair, he accuses Biff of being ‘spiteful” as a tactic to protect and defend himself from the knowledge of his betrayal.)
However, sometimes this attempt to control and interpret our experiences in a positive way backfires. Through the prism of his youthful experiences, Stephen Wheatley exaggerates his own significance in the spy narrative-adventure in such a way that sets him up for a fall. He recasts his memories as a test of manhood and concludes that that he has betrayed his country and “left a sick and starving man to die”. (191)
There is also fascinating evidence, with or without a slideshow, for a “positivity shift” as we age. Gallo cites his own and other research showing that older adults on average generate more positive memories than younger ones. “They probably don’t have more positive experiences, but they’re just more motivated to process information in a positive direction. When we’re younger we’re very detail-oriented, always trying to be very accurate and navigating through the world. Whereas as we get older, we realise the importance of regulating our own emotions, and that sometimes it’s more important to have a positive state of mind than it is to remember all the details.”
Traumatic memories: the burden of remembering
The memories that we are most intent on suppressing are often those that come back to challenge us.
As many psychologists or commentators remind us, quite frequently, the more we try to shape and control our realities through our memories the less control we may have, especially if we are trying to forget painful experiences. Sigmund Freud claims that traumatic experiences are often repressed in the subconscious but lurk beneath the surface and are often recalled during troublesome times. Accordingly, these experiences will have a big impact upon our realities.
We have a ‘compulsion to repeat’ which refers to the process of remembering or recalling aspects of our trauma which surface in distorted ways and interferes with our current day realities. This means that there is a kernel of truth, but the truth is distorted and displaced so that our memories become a product of both fact and fiction.
He maintains that: “Contrary thoughts are always closely connected with each other and are often paired off in such a way that the one thought is excessively intensely conscious while its counterpart is repressed and unconscious. The relation between the two thoughts is an effect of the process of repression. Repression is often achieved by means of an excessive reinforcement of the thought contrary to the one which is to be repressed. This process I call reactive reinforcement, and the thought which asserts itself with excessive intensity in consciousness and cannot be removed I call a reactive thought.”
Language : Any of these quotes below are nice and useful:
Desmond Tutu says, “Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.” Likewise, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, “the limits of my language define the limits of my world”. He alludes to the fact that we cannot know anything until we have a word for it, until we identify it in language, so our grasp of language can extend or contract our horizons. Individuals who are born into multilingual environments have a gateway to multiple cultural environments.
Language creates reality: In his acceptance speech (as the winner of the 2014 PEN/Pinter Award) author Salman Rushdie asserts that the “mangling of language” makes tyranny possible. The “deformed medievalist language of fanaticism”; the ”‘hate-filled religious rhetoric” has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today .
Language creates reality: Language and the words we use influence our perceptions and how we see ourselves and others in the world: Primatologist Jane Goodall was one of the first researchers in 1960 to assign names not labels to the apes she was observing. In scientific journals she attracted the condemnation of the scientific world because she assigned a gender, “he” or “she”, to the apes rather than “it”. Such terms humanise the apes and reflect her belief in the ability of apes to feel and have emotions; scientific words that seek to objectify the apes reflect the mindset of many scientists who prefer to keep the apes in the animal world. The use of human terms and labels evidently blurs the boundaries.
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