Integrity, Bigotry And Cross-Cultural Flux

In my generation, the biggest problem has been that people are exposed to all sorts of conflicting influences. This results in all sorts of people having a mess in their heads.

A woman whom I once cared for, Michele W., had education in science; but she also had all sorts of spiritual experiences. This resulted in her going back and forth between her conflicting influences. In some cases this worked for the better. She was availed of all sorts of different perspectives. The result was that she was able to produce some of the most beautiful writing I've ever seen.

In my case, I've explored all sorts of paths. Most of them had something of value to teach me. I came up with all sorts of thoughts on all sorts of subjects, and I've applied concepts from different places in different pursuits to arrive at original insight on different matters.

The task of my generation appears to be to make sense of all these conflicting influences. Scott Lasch said that my generation was “at sea.” There is a reason for this. The reason for this is democracy. In a democracy, everyone will be influencing everyone else. What most people will do is avail themselves of other influences; then they will come back to their roots and use what they've learned elsewhere to empower their roots. So, for example, I have seen in Australia a man coming from Jehovah's Witnesses getting together with a New Age girlfriend, then taking what he has learned from her home to his mother and having that knowledge used to empower Jehovah's Witnesses.

In such a climate, very few people would have what one would call integrity. If integrity means acting as a single unit, then people with conflicting influences would find such a thing hard to come by. They will however have more knowledge. This knowledge could get used for all sorts of different things. And from what I have seen, the most lasting outcome is, once again, people learning things from other influences and then taking their knowledge home.

Sometimes the influences will be for the better. Sometimes they will be for the worse. We see men from Middle East coming to places like Oslo and Sydney and teaching young men in bad neighborhoods to be even worse to women than they had been before. Sometimes people will leave their roots and go with other influences. Sometimes people will influence their roots to change their ways. I come from Jewish atheists, but I have converted to Christianity, and some members of my family have made the same decision.

In such a climate, very few people will get away with bigoted beliefs. That is the case whether the bigotry is of religious nature or of materialist nature. Everyone is influencing everyone else. In such a situation everyone has to think. And in such a situation the opinions that do form will be of superior nature than ones with which one has started.

Some people will not be able to handle this state of affairs. We are seeing some of this in the recent events in Charlottesville, where I attended university. When I was at UVA, my roommate was a Rush Limbaugh Republican, and I got to hear it quite a lot from his side. I also got to hear it from the 1990s feminists. Neither set of opinions appealed to me; but boy did I get to hear them.

I once heard it said on the Internet that one does not find out about other people by killing them but by living among them. I most certainly lived among all sorts of people. And in some cases, it is by finding out about the other people that one decides to go on a killing rampage. Not all of the Trump people are simply ignorant louts. Some appear to have a knowledge of what they are talking about. They decided that some people are living a lifestyle that is incompatible with their values, and they want to tear them to shreds.

The negative outcome of this state of affairs is confusion. The positive outcome of this state of affairs is people learning about other perspectives and using them to supplement their own. In the process everyone grows, except of course when they are killing one another.

This works also for the politically correct. For decades they have been throwing around terms such as “racist,” “misogynist” and “sociopath” on all sorts of people who weren't; so now they are being met with real ones of the above. I am not taking sides in this battle. Certainly if one party resorts to violence that should be contained by law enforcement. However I do not see either one as being better or worse than the other. Whether you preach tolerance but practice intolerance, or whether you both preach and practice intolerance, you are equal in my eyes.

Of course a major concept toward that effect is the dialectic. We are seeing all sorts of dialectics going on all around us, and there is absolutely nothing guaranteed about it working out for any kind of a positive synthesis of the forces. One immediate result is people beating the crap out of one another. Another result is people influencing one another for all sorts of negative outcomes. And then of course there is the constant possibility for an ongoing conflict with no resolution.

In such a situation, people very much do get to find out about one another. And then they decide whether to live with one another or to tear one another to shreds. We are seeing the possibility for both outcomes as well as any number of others. Not everyone who is choosing to be intolerant is a bigot. Some of them have educated reasons for being intolerant. They have learned from all sorts of others, and they are using this knowledge to empower their roots.