Bravery in Defense of Reality

A little tidbit that more people should probably know these days is that abundant evidence* increasingly converges on an actual, overarching answer to millennia of important existential questions. How reality works, i.e., the topic known in the Euro-Western intellectual tradition rather unfortunately as "metaphysics" or "ontology," isn't a mere matter of speculation or opinion anymore. It's not even primarily a matter of abstract logic and reason. There is, demonstrably, an empirically less wrong way of understanding being, reality, and the nature of things—in the broadest possible sense—that constitute the universe. And that way of understanding has immense practical, personal and political implications, not least of which is solidifying the ground on which to take a stand.

*(I promise I'll get back to reviewing more that convergent evidence one of these days, after I'm more settled in my new city. It's the most fun part of all this! So far I've touched on physics, biology x2, cognitive science x2, and economics, among others. There's much, much more, and it spans literally every domain of human inquiry; it wouldn't be metaphysics if it didn't, now, would it?)

The answer is 42 that reality turns out to be process-relational, through and through. The universe is a meshwork of dynamic and contingent interdependencies, systems of systems at every scale. It is not a collection of neatly separable, determinate substances bouncing around inside an inert container of three-linear-dimensional space. We can know that ontological fact as confidently as we can know the Earth orbits the Sun and not vice versa. We've looked and looked and there's just no such thing in reality as true isolation, timeless stasis, absolute purity, or view-from-nowhere perspective. Those concepts are human mental conveniences. The essentializing, contradiction-evading certainties they appear to provide are only approximate representations of a fuller reality. To exist is to be embedded in the flow of time and change and relation. In sum, every thing that exists is a relational process that results from and is situated within other relational processes. Period.

To illustrate with a couple of examples, "every thing" naturally includes the bravery to fight for the reality of our world. I'm far from the only person observing that the reason things feel so politically fraught lately is that we're in an existential fight over who gets to define reality itself. The thing we call bravery is crucial to that fight. It may superficially appear individualistic, but look more closely and bravery is a process, more verb than noun, that depends on—and in turn helps strengthen—reciprocal and regenerative relations with self and other. We'll loop back to this below. Similarly, the way we can understand our shared reality and get it less wrong is also a relational process. That's very distinct from relativism. Those whose information-gathering casts a wider relational net, with deeper intellectual humility and willingness to update priors, over a more varied but better process-validated array of sources, tend to get things less wrong across the board. We can distinguish who and what is less wrong based not on team loyalties, but on the patterns that emerge from testing contextually relevant evidence from diverse good-faith perspectives. I've provided a two-part guide to some of the nuts and bolts of doing that, and written about how to avoid the echo chambers that lead people to get the world especially wrong.

The enemy in our reality-defining fight is basically the 180-degree opposite of this empirically less-wrong direction. It's the common, partially self-fulfilling, but ultimately false expectations of a world of stasis, separateness, and idealized certainty about the nature and identity of things. These socially-shaped expectations (which then become demands) provide load-bearing support for rigid hierarchies and zero-sum competition. The more-wrong side of our reality battle attempts to flatten the complex, process-relational reality terrain in which we're enmeshed into black-and-white maps that can be defined and controlled from above. Proximity to reality-defining top-down power is imagined to provide protection from its inevitable abuses and to be worth sacrificing everything else to get or maintain. Unruly existence outside the map's narrowly bounded normativity is deemed to deserve eradication, or at least punishment. This kind of worldview seeks to divide, conquer, isolate, reduce, quantify, pin down, essentialize, abstractify, simplify, and ultimately kill the vibrant process-relationality that makes things matter. It can never be satisfied by anything less than ultimate victory making their in-group's simplistic pseudo-reality unquestioned and unquestionable. Alternatives cannot coexist, even if that means ruling over rubble. Some of the most committed proponents of this general worldview claim it's synonymous with "the West," though of course Western culture has never been limited to only this direction of belief.

Reducing complexity into simpler, context-stripped approximations does give useful results a lot of the time. Conventional sciences and analytic philosophy are just a few of the intellectual domains that get a lot of mileage out of reductionist modes. In day-to-day life, too, we have to separate and simplify things for ourselves to keep decisions manageable. It becomes problematic only when we confuse those handy conceptual maps for the real territory and reify them to the level of metaphysical worldview. Such unreal expectations/demands for top-down control and separating simplification are rooted largely in fear. Fear of difference, complexity, weirdness, change, impermanence, vulnerability, responsibility, contingency, uncertainty, unknowability, and loss; fears, in other words, of inescapable components of reality. We could include fears of hierarchical status decline, too, though those fears are more a result of these map-metaphysics and the worlds they build than they are a cause. Hierarchy-centric fears also tend to look the most like plain old selfish entitlement, grievance, and cruelty.

Yet the ironic result of letting these fears unravel the fabric of our reality is more change and uncertainty, more vulnerability and disempowerment, more mind-boggling complication, more loss and death. Just look around. Too many small-minded people insist on tightening the grip of rigidly defining hierarchies and on reducing what matters to numbers, and the outcomes are accelerating climate and ecological destruction, economic precarity, social fracturing, and worse. The tighter we try to grip the world, the more disorder squeezes out. When reductionist models and bright-line rules aren't intentionally integrated into a broader process-relational whole, what seems useful and control-enabling can often end up being quite destructive, creating more problems than it solves.

Everyone is always already applying one broad direction of metaphysics or the other, either toward an essentializing map or the dynamically entangled territory. That's because it's impossible to think about any thing without some underlying framework of what a thing, when you get right down to it, is. We each have capacities to orient our attention and effort either toward the regenerative stewardship of our process-relational, interdependent world, or toward its disintegration. Most of us wobble between both. Fascists may be the most devotedly committed to violently terraforming our reality down to conform to their simplified hierarchical maps, but they're not the only people who succumb to that direction's temptation to some degree. Sadly, anti-fascist and broadly progressive movements misalign and fracture on the basis of process-relationality failures all the time, such as by insisting on narrow conformity to One Right Way or One Simple Trick. The two-directional tension might even be built into the hemispheric structure of our brains. Luckily, knowing that lets us do something about it.

Despite (Euro-Western) metaphysics' intimidating reputation, understanding the shape of our fight at the foundational dimension of practical comparative metaphysics clarifies everything. It clarifies the stakes of what we're fighting over, which really are existential in multiple senses of the word. It clarifies the primary sides, without permanently pinning anyone down on one side or the other as either irredeemable or too-comfortably saved; getting things less wrong is constant work. It even clarifies where those of us who want to support regenerating reality should try to go from here, and how. Not necessarily with precision, but as a sort of north star, or like moss on the shadier side of trees, making sure we don't get too turned around and lose our way. There are countless diverse and worthwhile paths in the same general direction. With some effort and intentionality, that shared direction can bridge quite a lot of difference. That's huge.

Back to bravery. Not just a virtue in its own right, bravery is a necessary enabler of the consistent exercise of any other virtue. Alas, we haven't been seeing much of it from financial and institutional elites in the face of rising fascism. Social in-group nonconformity, profit reductions, and other pretty mild discomforts seem to be enough to pressure many business and political "leaders" to bow down and lick the boot. On the ground, though, bravery against fascism is more pervasive than many might think. It does often start with a few exceptional people motivated by fierce love and other relational values, perhaps with comparatively strong abilities to imagine radically different futures. Those individual triggers of courage, in turn, can be cultivated by relational processes like open knowledge sharing, intentional community building, and practice of emotional intelligence.

Once seeded with a few visible examples, bravery can become a contagious process. At a certain point, when it becomes apparent how many people will approve and have your back, actions that required significant courage no longer do. In this way, bravery ties in with getting reality less wrong through accumulating empirical evidence. Mistaking majority positions for minority ones and vice versa is known as "pluralistic ignorance." It's quite common in our terrible information environments, seeing as it's deliberately encouraged by the billionaires with power over our media. They try to hide the truth that authoritarian overcommitment to map-metaphysics is a minority position for losers driven by fear and gnawing emptiness. Most people, deep down, do care about things other than imposing conformity and hierarchical subjugation of others. Most people do prefer a regenerative world of pluralistic coexistence and mutual flourishing to a degenerate world where the main satisfaction is others' misery. Those shared baseline values can be tapped into and organized against the reality-flattening efforts that threaten them. Even to the extent people have deep-seated fears of uncertainty and difference, or of the genuine threats of fascism for that matter, those fears can often be overcome when everything that matters is shown to be on the other side of the scale.

Map-metaphysics believers project the appearance of inevitability by making it seem like in-group conformity and out-group subjugation is the only way to get by in an inherently predatory world of zero-sum individual and group competition. What's actually inevitable, however, is that process-relational reality snaps back. Reality itself is on the side of positive-sum good here. The grounded knowledge that that's the case should buck up our courage, as well as a certain measure of grace.

Kindness to different others is central to bravery in defense of regenerative reality, not some fluffy weakness. You could even say, cheesily, as Superman did, that it's the new punk rock. We shouldn't trust the consistently selfish and untrustworthy (ahem), but we should have the courage to exemplify the pro-social trustworthiness of which most people are capable, to expect and demand it of others and especially leaders, and to impose reasonable consequences for violations: at the very least, social shame and cultural pressure, which we should reclaim as vital tools for process-relational maintenance. It's true there's vulnerability in this sort of open, default-higher-trust relationality. At the same time, it's also our strength and resilience. Practicing it when stakes are lower can make it easier to call upon when stakes are higher.

Ultimately, bravery in defense of our interconnected reality is an expression of hope. Not optimism, which is something else entirely. Where optimism claims knowledge that things will probably turn out, hope embraces the accuracy and humility of admitting we don't know, and in that fact there is immense potential. The power struggles between zero-sum divisive flattening and positive-sum mutual flourishing will never end as long as humans exist. The human and more-than-human world is far too systemically complex and contingent to ever be fully predicted or controlled, but it can be known well enough to be stewarded with care in the right direction. Small possibilities can grow in the cracks of dominant ways of being until they become the new dominant ways of being. Seemingly permanent structures can become brittle and erode away. Cascading tipping points can arrive unexpectedly, sometimes pushed by something that by itself appears quite insignificant. It's always worth finding the courage to do what's right, keep it real, and push whatever's within our reach in the less-wrong, more regenerative and process-relational direction.