Creating Reality

My original plan for this blog has evidently flagged. I find myself often thinking of things I would like to write about, but I’m not making the time to actually write them. I’m switching to a new plan. My goal now is to write a new post every day (perhaps every weekday), writing for about fifteen minutes. This will most likely imply more personal notes and more random notes. I’ll see how it goes.

First up: in 2004, before the last presidential election, Ron Suskind wrote an interesting article in the New York Times magazine about the Bush administration (online here). The most interesting paragraph was this one, citing a “senior adviser to Bush:”

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I’ve been thinking about that off and on since I first read it when the article came out. I don’t find it a very natural way of viewing the world. But what I wonder about is the extent to which it is or could be true. The world in which we live is shaped to a great degree by the concepts which we believe. I don’t mean this in a literal sense, of course, but it is true that most of us spend most of our time in a conceptual world, whether we are at work, or watching television, or at church, or whatever.

In a conceptual world, it is certainly possible that when a powerful organization acts, they change the conceptual reality. Thus when the president says that we are at war with terror, that is a significant change in the world, even though in some sense it doesn’t really mean anything at all. In this view of the world, real power is the ability to impose your view of the world on other people. And the president does have that ability.

I think that George Lakoff was trying to get at this in his discussions of how the Democratic party needs to change their metaphors. Changing metaphors is a way to fight against the attempts of others to impose their view of the world. But it has the problem that you can’t keep up with whoever went first. And it has the different problem that when everybody sticks to their own metaphors, real communication becomes very difficult.

I think a better answer is to try to force people to cash out their ideas in terms of real action. What does the war on terror really mean? That is, what will we do differently that we would not otherwise have done? This is much harder than it may sound. Adopting a concept changes your thinking and your behaviour even while you are questioning that concept. But refusing to adopt the concept leaves you talking past each other.