I was always amazed at my mother’s ability to sum people up when I was young. Not the least when she met my friends and would tell me how they were likely to react in certain situations. And I recall how many people see ‘character traits’ in toddlers and how people say of adults ‘oh they have always been like that.’
It seems in a world of chaos and chance human beings have some rigidity in their thinking and presence. A rigidity that we need to survive in a world where survival is necessary; but is it necessary anymore? How far do our nature’s now compromise our imaginations, which is the pathway to knowledge?
What we know, we find we only believe. How we think the world works, we discover is only one philosophy of life. A millennium of certainty can we wiped out in landslide. An ageless tradition can be shown to be deeply ignorant in one scientific experiment. An attitude and accepted habit can be unpicked in a ‘life-changing’ experience.
Yet we cling to the belief that our cultures are as fruitful and necessary as the sun rising. We reject a hundred ideas so that one can be our leading light. We are endlessly looking for principles of unity which constantly tear us as societies apart.
We even think society a good thing in and of itself. But how helpful to mother nature are they? And without mother nature all our certainties are written in water. And the character of mother nature is eternal mutation and change.