A peripatetic (note small ‘p’) view
of truth
A version
of this essay appeared in the reunion book for the 25th reunion of
the class of 1978 at
When I was fourteen years old, I made
a resolution to devote my life to seeking truth. I had a mental image of what truth looked
like. It was a very bright light that
shot off sparks, like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. I was going to follow this light and I was
going to find TRUTH.
I cannot remember if I imagined that bright light before or
after student radicals blew up my father’s laboratory at the University of
Wisconsin, which was the other pivotal, character-forming event of that year:
waking up to that thunderous sound in the middle of the night, then the phone
call, then my father telling my mother that his whole life had been destroyed
with that laboratory. It must have been
before.
As I recall, in high school, my search
for truth focused on an interest in pre-Christian religions in
After high school, I became an
exchange student in
In France, I also found myself sharing a desk with a
Trotskyite. Somehow, growing up just
after the Red Scare, I had subconsciously come to associate Communism with
madness. It provoked a real identity
crisis for me, finding myself sharing a desk with an obviously sane, and very
nice, girl, who was not only Communist, but an ultra revolutionary type of
Communist.
I came back from France a very
different person, but I couldn’t have said who.
I almost immediately found myself sharing a Dartmouth dorm room with
someone who underwent a very emotional born again Christian experience freshman
spring. This experience first manifested
itself when I found her shaving her legs in preparation for being baptized in
the Dartmouth swimming pool. Later she
sometimes she sat on her bed staring at the ceiling, transported with
bliss. I could not connect with this
behavior. Leg shaving seemed so
vain. A swimming pool seemed so secular
that it sounded heretical to be baptized in it. The juxtaposition of the two together was
weird for me. I would have preferred to
be back in France sharing a desk with a Trotskyite, somehow the latter would
have seemed less shocking.
I resolved, somewhat electrally,
possibly remembering for the first time in several years my image of that sparkling
light of TRUTH, that I was going to search for TRUTH in my major, physics,
which was also my father’s field. I
imagined that, by digging deep into the submicroscopic domains of atomic,
nuclear, and plasma physics, I would find the fundamental mechanisms by which
the entire universe was governed.
Coincidentally, my first lab partner freshman year was a Maoist. How did that happen at conservative
Dartmouth? My mother, a liberal Mount
Holyoke alum, told me that Dartmouth students had fought on the side of the
British during the revolutionary war and they had been that way (reactionary)
ever since.
My conviction that physics was the
path to truth was to last little better than those things that came
before. The end came one day, when I was
sitting in quantum mechanics, listening to my favorite physics professor, Bruce
Pipes. He had come to the point in his
lecture where he had proven that the mathematical formulations of quantum
mechanics allowed two initially identical systems to reach different, i.e.
non-identical, states; because of the inherent randomness of the underlying
processes. At this point, because he
found himself in a liberal arts school, he decided to say something
philosophical. He said something to the
effect of “This is where Einstein said ‘God does not play dice with the
universe.’ And if it bothered Einstein it should bother you, too.” It did bother me.
In parallel with my study of physics, I had discovered I had
a great love of history, particularly Chinese intellectual history. I had been distressed to discover that I
enjoyed history more than physics, even though history was harder for me. I had learned to read text very slowly,
because in math and physics you cannot skip even one word. In history, I had to read a book every week,
which required skimming. It’s hard to be
able to skim and read in great detail with the same brain. My new love of history made me question my
choice of major.
My favorite history professor, John Major (no pun intended),
knowing my interest in science, gave me some brief, informal, private
instruction in the history of the philosophy of science. He told me that early scientists had believed
in a loving God. They believed a loving
God must govern the world according to predictable, discoverable, and
understandable laws. They reasoned that
only a tyrant would govern the world in any other way. I had also been studying Russian and the
Soviet Union. Someone at about that time
(or maybe it was later) said to me that the great wrong of the Soviet Union was
that no one could discover the rules.
One could be sent to the gulag without understanding what one had
done. That was the essence of tyranny. According to early scientists, God was the
opposite. Everything with God would be
predictable, sensible, understandable.
So, when I sat there listening to Bruce Pipes talking about
Einstein’s philosophical problems with quantum mechanics, I saw a reductio ad absurdum, something I had
studied in my second major, mathematics.
If you were doing a mathematical proof, and your reasoning led you to a
conclusion that contradicted your assumptions, that proved that your
assumptions were wrong. If the science
of physics had proved that God was random, capricious, and unpredictable, that
meant that science itself was based on a false assumption.
The increasing complexity of the sub-atomic zoo that plasma
physicists were uncovering also concerned me.
The bizarreness of the results suggested to me that one might find
almost anything by sufficient application of physics. This tended to confirm my belief that physics
was based on false assumptions.
Conveniently, the Taoism and Zen Buddhism that I had studied
in Chinese intellectual history provided an attractive, alternative world view.
I had also been studying yoga in P.E.
I began attending a Quaker Meeting near campus, which
appealed to my mew Zen-like awareness.
It also appealed to me because of its pacifism, which felt right to me
in light of the bombing of my father’s laboratory. I, too, had been opposed to the war in
Vietnam, but could not at all support the idea of bombing my father’s
laboratory. The very first message I
heard in a Quaker Meeting was “I need not shout my faith. The very hills are mute, yet how they speak
of God.” This had exactly 17 words. 17 was a very fashionable number in the math
department. This message also spoke to
my disapproval of the way I saw some Christians expressing their faiths. It all sort of crystallized for me. It took three and a half years, but I
eventually became a Quaker. In this way,
I began on a path of seeking truth through meditation, while still at
Dartmouth.
I tried auditing a course in European intellectual history
to balance my Chinese intellectual history.
I found the European one so boring that I could not stand it — besides,
it all seemed to be leading in the direction of the mathematical and scientific
reasoning that I was rejecting.
I had essentially completed the physics major, so I was able
to drop the second major, mathematics, and pursue my study of Russian, instead,
so that I could spend the summer after graduation in the Soviet Union, which
seemed much more exciting. I did go to
the Soviet Union, but my experience there was not very truth altering. I was kept in a dormitory with other Americans. I was mostly irritated with their cultural
insensitivity and rudeness.
When I read these paragraphs about the things I was thinking
at Dartmouth, I see that the college did a really good job. The number of different ideas that I was
exposed to there was enormous; and what I have described here is only part of
them.
I ended up going to law school in 1980, after working at IBM
for two years. IBM at that time reminded
me a bit too much of the Soviet Union. I
was even working on software for keeping track of the five year plan of the
local site. Play the music from “The
Twilight Zone” at this point. The IBM
internal publications for employees reminded me a lot of Pravda. Of course, my comparative economics course at
Dartmouth had taught me that the Soviet government was essentially state
capitalism. The resemblance to corporate
governance should not have surprised me, but it did, unpleasantly.
Law school (at Columbia) led me in the direction of
believing that TRUTH did not exist.
Instead, truth became a relative thing, depending on your
perspective. Is a hard transition going
from math and physics to law. You have
to abandon the idea that there is a correct step-by-step way to reason from a
good assumption to a correct conclusion.
You have to substitute the idea that reason can be twisted to a myriad
of world views. But I did end up a
lawyer. Being a lawyer seemed to fit
well with my Zen-like view of the world.
And now, when I read, I find it easy to skim, and very hard to read in
great detail.
But my Zen-like view, too, was to become unsatisfying. The shock to my belief in meditation came
with my second child, in 1993. I had
affiliated myself at that time with a Quaker Meeting that was very New Age in
character. It had a yoga class. Many of the members aspired to Eastern-style
meditation. The silence there was very
deep and mystical.
I often sat in the meeting with my child, who had a birth
defect, laryngomalacia. This condition
makes it hard for the child to breath.
The breathing is labored, and noisy.
Fortunately, the children generally grow out of it, if they survive,
which mine did. I love my children
passionately, and I loved sitting with this baby in Meeting. His noises did not prevent me from
centering.
The other members of the Meeting found my child’s noises
disturbing to their meditations. They
asked me not to bring him in any more.
I was outraged. I
remembered the words of Jesus: “Suffer the little children to come unto
me.” I was quite certain that he would
never have sent my child away as these Quakers had done. Eastern-style meditation suddenly seemed very
puerile.
I developed a theory of modes of anthropomorphization of the
universe. I identified the following
modes:
·
paganism,
where the universe is governed by a multiplicity of anthropomorphic spirits;
·
monotheism,
where the universe is associated with a single personality;
·
science,
where the universe is modeled with a particular kind of human thought, i.e.
mathematics;
·
Eastern-style
meditation, where the practitioner associates an altered human mind state,
induced by meditation, with the ultimate nature of the universe.
I decided
that all of these modes of anthropomorphization were fundamentally futile, that
the universe is beyond human understanding.
I notice that a lot of educated people seem to have a hard time with the
idea that mathematics is only a form of human thought. To them, I tell the example of how we learned
to count. We hold out our hand. We count five fingers. We think that it exists outside of our heads,
but it is only our heads that let us look at our hand as having five fingers
that can be grouped together, when each finger is unique.
I started going to a different Quaker Meeting, one where my
son seemed more welcomed and where things were a good deal less mystical and
more secular.
This did not prevent me from having a Zen-like experience
several years later, at work. I was an
intellectual property attorney at Philips Electronics North America
Corporation. One of my responsibilities
was to supervise the use of the house trademarks: the word “Philips” in a
particular font and the shield emblem, which had to be reproduced exactly,
photographically. This was a very
frustrating experience. Every sales and
marketing person had some creative way that he or she wanted to change these
symbols. Each such person thought that
his or her variation had some special marketing appeal, while in fact none of
these variations were permissible at all.
Eventually, I had seen so many impermissible variations that they all
looked utterly random, and all equally stupid.
I was complaining about this to a sympathetic listener,
another attorney in my department, who was similarly distressed at the way all
of these variations kept popping up. And
then my moment hit me:
Randomness/Creativity,
Quantum Mechanics/God.
I cannot
put into this into words very well. But
it seemed very overwhelming to me at the time.
I was rather dizzy and had to sit down.
I tried to explain what I was thinking to my co-worker, who was a Roman
Catholic. I’m not sure whether he
understood.
Something similar happened to me only
a few weeks ago. My older son is
12. He has been reading The Lord of the Rings. Actually, he read
it several times and also watched the movie several times. He was curious as to why the movie depicted
Sauron having a physical body. He pulled
out a reference volume, which explained that Sauron was a lieutenant of
Morgoth. Morgoth was a God, a God of
evil. My son reasoned that this would
make Sauron a demon. My son was troubled
with the idea that a demon would have a physical body. He thought a demon should only be a
spirit.
I pointed out that many books depict
demons as having a kind of material/spiritual duality. This would include the Bible, the Xanth
series (that my son has also been reading), as well as The Lord of the Rings. I
told my son that material/spiritual duality reminded me of the wave/particle
duality of quantum mechanics. This also hit me in a Zen-like way, as I imagine
Zen monks are hit with sticks in their monasteries:
Material/spiritual duality
(religious and fantasy literature)
Wave/particle duality
(Quantum Mechanics)
Are subatomic particles demons? If God cannot play dice with the universe,
perhaps demons can? And where do demons fit into the theory of a loving God?
Ah, well, I cannot say as I am any
closer to TRUTH that I was when I was 14, but it has been interesting.