Shakespeare, Childlike Faith, and the Social Construction of Reality: Part Two

In my last post, I began exploring the inescapable correlation between reality and perspective, between truth and experience.  A discussion like this inevitably brings to light the age-old question of the nature of truth:  is there absolute truth, or is all truth relative?

In short, my answer is YES.  But that’s not good enough, now is it?

To go a bit deeper, let me return to my previous analogy of children.  Kids understand the world as they experience it.  This can cause embarrassing moments for parents when their kids expect that everyone has the same experience that they have.  But children are also very moldable.  It takes a pretty sheltered childhood to prevent a kid from having his reality shaken up by change.  When your life amounts to less than a decade, even small changes can stir up the soup.  In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, they have an uncanny way of adapting to changes, usually quicker than adults, stuck in our worlds of routine and predictability, are able to.  Perhaps it’s a survival tactic—when you’re little, you’ve got to develop ways to cope with a big world.

So our little Ecuadorian girl from Part One packs her bags and moves with her family up to Greenland with our other friend (probably not likely, but run with me here), and suddenly the world isn’t so blistering anymore.  She gets to build snowmen and go sledding and experience that painful feeling your fingers get when you walk into a warm house from the cold.  To her, it’s a different world.  It’s a different reality.  And it’s just as true as it is back at the middle of the globe where the sun burns all day long.

Let’s be clear:  there are absolutes involved in all of this.  It is absolute truth that the sun casts more rays onto the region around the Equator, making average temperatures hotter there than anywhere else on the planet.  It is also absolute truth that the areas closest to the Earth’s poles receive the least direct sunlight, keeping things pretty darn chilly (though our polar bear friends would remind us that it’s not quite as chilly as it once was).  These are truths that are beyond questioning.

They are also truths that reveal themselves in varying levels of significance to different people.  Their meaning is certainly relative to those by whom they are experienced.  Consider this:  even the definition of the word “absolute” itself is relative.  Humans invented language.  Somewhere along the way, I imagine there was a primordial debate about the meaning of life and someone suggested a concept that involves an unchanging reality that is the basis of our existence.  What to call this idea?  And so the caveman word for absolute was developed.  Over lots and lots of time, languages died, were created, and evolved, and eventually there was one called English.  English included a word for this concept, “absolute,” and through the centuries, the meaning of that word was refined and reshaped by the culture of which it was a part.  Today, there’s nothing truly absolute about the word “absolute.”

Relativity is scary.  It means that what we believe might not always hit the nail on the head.  It means that the dude we’re vigorously debating with at the coffee shop could actually be right.  I think that’s okay.  Why be afraid to encounter more out there than what we’ve already found?  Why shy away from a groundbreaking discovery?

Is there absolute truth?  Yeah, I believe so.  Have we absolutely uncovered it?  I truly doubt it.  That’s why the heart of life is a search for the truth.  We claw our way to the mountaintop, only to find that there’s another peak to scale.  Now and then, we find a piece of truth that moves us from Ecuador to Greenland.  How do we respond?  We sell everything we have and invest our whole selves into that nugget that will shape the next leg of our journey.  We adapt.  And we keep on living.

Shakespeare, Childlike Faith, and the Social Construction of Reality: Part One

A movie came out last fall that caused a stir in the literary world.  The premise of Anonymous suggests that the 38 plays and 154 sonnets that are generally credited to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, England were actually written by a man of the gentry known as Lord Oxford.  This is not a new idea; in fact, it’s at least a century old.  Scholars have long noticed reasons to question Shakespeare’s authorship and have found connections with Oxford and others.

Among these revolutionaries who straddle the fence that sections off a possibility that is dangerous to the way we view history, there are of course the stalwarts who refuse to go near the fence—that is, if they even acknowledge the existence of land on the other side.  These folks would never stoop to entertain the idea that Hamlet’s struggle to be or not to be could have come from anyone but the beloved Bard, that someone else was comparing a lover to a summer’s day.

Here’s the funny thing about it all:  four hundred years after Shakespeare breathed his last, it no longer matters who wrote all those classics.  It doesn’t matter because the world, as a whole, accepts Shakespeare as the author.  There are no conclusive documents one way or the other, so we don’t have any overwhelming reason to question it, and thus, we accept it as truth.  Even if Lord Oxford, or Lord Vader for that matter, was the real author, our reality counters the reality that existed at the turn of the seventeenth century.  Our society has decided to give Shakespeare the credit.  So, for all intents and purposes of today, William Shakespeare wrote everything that we say he wrote.

Put your thinking cap on; I’m getting meta up in here.  If I make a choice on the basis that something I believe happened sometime in the past, that event is just real as all of the things that actually occurred.  One’s understanding of reality doesn’t require every part, or even any part, of that understanding to have existed in time and space.  My acceptance of fiction as reality creates a reality within that fiction.

Let’s take a step back.  Children are the best example I can think of to illustrate this cognitive whirlwind.  Kids understand the world as they experience it.  A kid who has grown up in Ecuador and never left her country understands the world as an immensely hot place.  And she’s right.  But another kid who’s never strayed from his home in Greenland would disagree.  It’s freezing out in this world!  And he’s right too.  They both are.  They both know truth as it exists within their realities.  They both live their lives in a way that reflects those truths.  She doesn’t wear a whole lot, while he bundles up to get the mail.  They’re both right.

We’ve seen good in this this, and we’ve seen bad.  Every person who has made a lasting difference on the world has had to exist within a reality that she or he has decided is true.  If Gandhi’s advice was to be the change we want to see, we have to first live in that change.  In Mother Theresa’s reality, no one, not even people bursting with infected puss, should be exempt from love.  It didn’t matter at all to her that most others don’t live in that kind of world; she lived her life in the reality that she saw.  And she was right.

Unfortunately, those with less-than-pure motives also have this world-shaping power.  In the reality of the Crusaders of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the cross was a symbol of violence towards those who had not accepted their brand of Christianity.  It didn’t matter at all to them that their religion’s founder preached loving one’s enemies; they lived their lives in their own reality.

Our perceived reality is truth to us.  It molds our lives and becomes our tangible reality.  So what reality do we live in?  And what world will we choose to make a reality?