Reality?

 This note is brought to you from one of two camps. First, the camp of I'm an idiot and questions things everybody has already worked out, or second, I'm asking difficult questions we don’t want to talk about. Anyway, let’s start with a nice, simple, question…

What is reality? 

Seriously, what is it? Nobody seems to be sure and it’s become something I pick at and find myself coming back to all the time. I don’t really know why, but I think that a) my consciousness has changed a bit and b) I’m very conscious that things are always presented as solids when everything’s actually quite porous and granular, even when it's a notional concept. 

Or perhaps notional concepts are especially because they often seem to be built to fit one particular story, ignoring alternative narratives. They’re intensely personal, because they’ve been shaped by our own experiences (and each of us lives within our own reality). The other thing is that we instinctively seek to make these things concrete, certain, because we want to feel as if life progresses according to a set of rules rather than everything being in a state of flux… which it is. Chaos rules and we’re just trying to carve out little spaces where we can delude ourselves that there’s some sort of permanence.   

It seems to me that we live in a… I’m not sure I have the words for this yet… but that there are two levels to what we call “reality”. On the one hand we have solid things which are explained (mostly) by science - scientific reality if you will. I don’t mean the sort of science which sounds like SF, like Quantum Mechanics, because I’m not qualified to talk about that and even thinking about it makes my head hurt. I mean concepts like stone or wood, animals, birds, fish - all the things and creatures we can touch and see even if sometimes we need a microscope to do it. The natural world, concepts like magnetism and so on. This level deals with things that are actually real, but which we often ignore (see the reaction to the Climate Crisis, or the treatment of Covid as a danger). These provide a foundation which “Reality (™)” is built upon, but are usually taken for granted except in places where they clash with humans, at which point we usually create stories to explain them. At that point we’re back to the “cats are creatures of the Devil, we must burn them” situation - which was one of the factors in making the Black Death so serious, or in the use of “alpha” and “beta” to describe men which are drawn from a thoroughly debunked study of wolves from the 1960s. Stories trump scientific reality even at this level, because most of us are taking the knowledge we have here at a very shallow level or acting entirely on faith. My knowledge that if I flick a switch I turn on a light is based on a very shallow learning about electricity, and it functions more like an act of faith that the light will work if I turn it on. I don’t imagine I’m alone in that. 

Laid atop this level we have another, which seems to be what most people mean when they talk about “Reality ©”. This is a collection of stories that humans use to try and make sense of the world and which actually control our behaviour to some extent. Concepts like religion, law, aesthetics, economics, gender, and so on inhabit this realm, and exist as first ideas and ideals, and then as oppressors for the most part. They add to the idea of Rousseau’s “Man is free, but everywhere he is in chains” (by which of course he meant humans, he may have been a masochist, but he wasn’t talking about a fun CFNM/bondage event). 

Our focus on this realm seems far greater than on what underpins it, perhaps because we are troupe primates and so we’re always more interested in each other than on others (something that can be seen in how interested cats or dogs are in other members of their species and perhaps in the way that men listen to men and women listen to women among our own). We also play status games based on how much we cleave to these imaginary yardsticks that we have created around what we are (so for example, a man may gain status from how strong he is, while a woman’s fecundity may grant her status because we have stories that say men should be strong and women fertile).The thing appears to be that we make the story, or rather usually we adapt it, forget we made it and then use it as a stick to beat anyone who doesn’t measure up. We may have fantastically legitimate reasons for creating it, as a way to redress a perceived imbalance, or to seek justice, but ultimately it will become something that imprisons us rather than providing liberation. 

Here, we might refer to a recent evolution in anti racist ideology where people are encouraged to scour their psyches for ways in which they are internally racist. On one hand it sounds laudable, but on the other doesn’t it encourage less action opposing actual racism and more navel gazing? Will we ever be non-racist enough to consider ourselves anything but racists in this situation? It sounds anxiety inducing, and as if it's the type of thing designed to oppose getting things done. We could apply the strategy to everything and only find gate keepers telling us we couldn’t go on a demo or write a piece opposing the thing we’re talking about because we hadn’t dredged our souls enough to qualify to write or protest or even ally ourselves with whatever minority group we were trying to support.

I use this to demonstrate that we’re still enslaving ourselves to ideas, not using them to make the world a better place, though we think we are. I use “world” here to mean the human world - if anything the pandemic demonstrated that our woes and problems matter not a jot to the rest of nature unless we inflict it upon them. Anyone who watched the birds and insects getting on with their lives oblivious to Covid in 2020 will have realised how little we matter to nature and, I hope, have gloried in that. Here “world” *is* a human idea, not so very different to “reality” that defines how things ‘ought’ to work. It does not reflect the planet and the denizens upon it.

Another example would be that of masculinity, which has become such a strict master it appears to drag just under half the human race to ever greater extremes of toxic behaviour through a mixture of fear, anger, and denied privilege. The middle ground seems quite lost, churned to mud under the chariot wheels of the sex wars, even though I would suggest that it’s where the majority of people with XY chromosomes actually dwell. 

In the past there was a strong focus on making sure you fitted the stories that surrounded you. Failing to do so would lead to social ostracism, or at the very least “people would talk”, and that would be a bad thing. Despite the first sentence of this paragraph, that fear is still there in *every* community - it’s just that the criteria for being shunned have shifted… to an extent. We still perform our genders, and we’re still punished for a failure to do so even as the gender is reinvented for every generation (though that may also be labelled “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”. There’s still an iceberg, still a ship, you’ve just changed it so that men wearing makeup isn’t a shunning offence, for example). I don't know if the core of the concept stays static or if that too is an illusion based on the human need for the idea of permanence. 

The thing I now wonder as a result of this thought is… if reality is stories, and if we spend most of our childhoods being indoctrinated… sorry, socialised… in these stories and ideas - as if our parents and teachers opened our skulls and poured them in like a macabre breakfast cereal advert… Then who am I: indeed, who are you? 

What about me is actually me, and what’s a story that I’ve been given and either accepted or  reacted against? Is my reaction to the story me or is that another element of the story? Is anything, ultimately, about me real, or is it all based on the stories I’ve been stuffed full of? In the same way, how much of me is based on other people’s expectations and ideas? None of us grows up in a vacuum (arguably there just isn’t room, even in a really big one), so none of us grows up without the ideas of others’ impacting us. Whether that’s the idea that little girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice, though arguably rather bad for your teeth, and little boys are made of things that would challenge even Heston Blumenthal to make a decent dinner from - which may seem innocuous - to other concepts like  “good girls don’t” or the slut/stud dichotomy (and it’s partner: women who masturbate are brave explorers and men that do the same are dirty perverts), we are always at the mercy of other people’s ideas about who and what we are. 

Alan Watts mentions this in a lot of his talks too, the idea that at its most benign arguably we’re being told that when we experiment with different ways of being as children, “that’s not you, that’s Timmy” or Charlotte, or whatever the name of the friend we were imitating was. But… isn’t that a way to make us conform to our parents’ idea of who we are? What if we behave quite differently when they aren’t with us? It overlooks the idea that we are different people in different situations, even if the core of how we approach life remains the same, and that we all wear masks on a metaphorical level. Of course, there’s perhaps a version of us that’s the most authentic… but only we know who that is because they only manifest when we’re alone. Even with our nearest and dearest we wear a mask.

This idea of us being shaped by stories rather reminds me of Philip Larkin's ``This Be The Verse”, (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse) with its lines “They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra just for you” too. I’m not saying that this is a malicious act or one undertaken even to damage (though there are plenty of parents who manage that either accidentally or on purpose). It’s just part of the generational transfer of knowledge, and of the inevitable nature of humanity to get marooned because after a while we don’t keep up with all the knowledge, indeed, that would be a full time job in itself and likely not one most of us would find particularly satisfying. 

Besides, to return to Larkin, we can see that our parents went through the same process. “But they were fucked up in their turn/By fools in old style hats and coats/Who half the time were soppy stern/And the other at each others’ throats”. So this is very much a tendency to hand down misery across the generations, most likely because nobody had the chance to stop and ask themselves who they really were, instead of clinging to old stories they’d been given, because they’d been taught not to question and believed that things were “just the way they were” instead of seeing things as a human construct that only functioned because nobody challenged them. 

I would argue plenty of people did question in words or actions or because of their opinions or sexuality, but they were ostracised and made unwelcome in far more severe ways than they would be today - lost their jobs, their homes, and ended up struggling to make ends meet or, alternatively, committed suicide. Names like Alan Turing spring to mind. I am thankful we seem, in the UK, to largely have moved beyond this situation.

If we take this view, that reality is entirely composed of fictions, or facts that are only facts because they’re backed by fictions, and that we were all taught these stories growing up and that the bulk of our identities’ bedrocks are formed by them, then in that light I return to the question. 

Who am I? If you took all the things that have been put there by society about gender, or my parents’ vision of who I am, or whatever, what would be left? 

I don’t mean to suggest there’s nothing else to us, the nature/ nurture debate is always a difficult one and often attracts people to one extreme or another rather than seeing each element nesting in each other like a weird Gordian Knot. It just seems to me that so much is poured into us in terms of expectations or normative ideals of how we should behave and act in the world that it seems almost as if we are robbed of agency from the very beginning and that, subsequently, the act of becoming our own people and finding our independence is in itself an act of transgression. 

If the key anchors of what we would say are our identities are based purely on fiction, it begs the question of whether we exist at all, at least in the way we’re used to thinking about it. Can you touch something about yourself and say that it’s entirely, independently, you? I don’t know. If I did, I wouldn’t ask the question. I have no answers, only questions and a desire for dialogue. 

I have nothing else to say and want to shut up because I feel like I’m probably talking past people at this point. Still, even after my rant above I’m still left with those questions. 

What is reality? 

And, if reality *is* just a bunch of stories we stuff into our heads to explain the world, then putting all that to one side… Who are you?