Thanks to the New Yorker magazine, I'm finally able to articulate
the reason for my crush on the skinny guy with the funny name.
Is it because he's multiracial, you may ask? Is it because
he doesn't wear ties and speaks candidly about his recreational
drug history? Yes, all of those things contribute. But the
real reason for my infatuation is his crazy wisdom, in the
Zen sense of the term. Barack Obama is trustworthy because
he embodies contradiction, and because he often voices doubt
about the correctness of his own opinions. He subscribes to
the ideology of no ideology, humility in the face of the world's
complexity, and a commitment to remaining open to new evidence.
It's a quality that he shares with NYC's remarkably competent
and farsighted mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and it's one that
he emphatically does not share with President Bush or his
would-be successor Rudolph Giuliani.
Why is the embrace of contradiction such an admirable quality?
Here's a parable about Einstein's
buddy Kurt Gödel, adapted from Rucker's
Infinity and the Mind, with some color by Douglas
Adams.
Imagine that Gödel goes to visit Deep Thought, a stupendous
computer. Imagine that Deep Thought is capable of correctly
answering any question at all. (That's how we know the Ultimate
Answer to Life, The Universe And Everything to be forty-two.)
Mischievous skeptic that he is, Gödel decides to stump
this supposed Universal Truth Machine. He writes out the
following sentence: "Deep Thought will never say that
this sentence is true." Call this sentence G for Gödel.
Another way to phrase G is: "Deep Thought will never
say G is true."
Now Gödel chuckles and asks Deep Thought whether G
is true or not. If Deep Thought says G is true, then the
statement "Deep Thought will never say G is true"
is false. If the statement "Deep Thought will never
say G is true" is false, then G is false (since G =
"Deep Thought will never say G is true"). So if
Deep Thought says G is true, then G is in fact false, and
Deep Thought has made a false statement. So Deep Thought
will never say that G is true, since Deep Thought makes
only true statements, and around and around we go, forever
and ever. At this point, Deep Thought's screen turns blue,
displays a cryptic error message, and his attendant philosopher-priests
begin frantically pressing Control-Alt-Delete and dialing
tech support.
In fact, Gödel proved that what's true of Deep Thought
is true of any formal system from basic arithmetic on up through
multivariable calculus and beyond: every consistent
system of formal logic is incomplete, and every complete
system is inconsistent. This is a very real fact of the physical
world, one whose consequences you experience whenever your
computer crashes. When it's confronted with a statement like
the one Gödel fed to Deep Thought, a computer goes around
and around indefinitely until some outside agent intervenes.
It's literally impossible to write a computer program that's
immune from Gödel's endless logical loops. What makes
humans 'smarter' than computers is that our minds are associative
and evolutionary, not formally logical. While we aren't so
good at, say, long division of ten-digit numbers, we're very
well-equipped to hold multiple contradictory truths in our
head at any one time. (Luckily, we can also build computers
to do our long division for us.) Making it a practice to study
logical paradoxes is healthy, as it can lead to the attainment
of Buddha-nature.
It's a very good thing we don't crash every time we encounter
an undecidable statement, since the real world is full of
them. George W Bush and Osama bin Laden share an essential
quality: they imagine their self-contained, complete-seeming
ideologies to be both consistent and complete. It isn't a
flaw with their ideologies in particular; the problem is with
the very idea that universal moral truths exist. I can see
why our isolated preliterate ancestors might have imagined
their particular cultural norms to be universal, but there's
been an awful lot of water under the bridge since then.
Obama, unlike nearly everyone else on the left, seems to
be hip to Gödel's incompleteness theorem and its broader
philosophical implications. For one thing, he understands
that no human mind can be complete as a closed system, that
it requires a social context to work properly. From Larissa
MacFarquhar's article in the New Yorker's 5/7/07 issue:
Innocence, freedom, individualism, mobility - the belief
that you can leave a constricting or violent history behind
and remake yourself in a new form of your choosing - all
are part of the American dream of moving west, first from
the old country to America, then from the crowded cities
of the East Coast to the open central plains and then on
to the Pacific. But this dream, to Obama, seems credulous
and shallow, a destructive craving for weightlessness. When
Obama, as a young man, went to Kenya for the first time
and learned how his father's life had turned out - how he
had destroyed his career by imagining that old tribalisms
were just pettiness, with the arrogant idea that he could
rise above the past and change his society by sheer force
of belief - Obama's aunt told him that his father had never
understood that, as she put it, "if everyone is family,
no one is family." Obama found this striking enough
so that he repeated it later on [in his book], in italics:
If everyone is family, no one is family. Universalism
is a delusion. Freedom is just abandonment. You might start
by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town,
your people and your way of life, and when, later on, you
end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too,
it seems only a natural progression.
A mainstream politician who understands that within-group
amity fuels between-group enmity! You could've knocked
me over with a feather when I read that. More evidence of
Obama's accepting, Buddha-like outlook:
"By nature, I'm not somebody who gets real worked
up about things," Obama writes in his second book.
"When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across
the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously."
He tends to think of his opponents as deluded and ridiculous,
rather than as demons. "I've never been a conspiracy
theorist," he says. "I've never believed there
are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the
strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is
that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people
in government or in the corporate arena, the more human
everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with
money, those with influence, those with control over how
resources are allocated in our society, are very protective
of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely
the reasons why they should have more money and power than
anyone else, why that's good for society as a whole."
This, I think, is the best possible capsule summary of all
the crimes of the Bush administration, and Obama deserves
serious attention for having delivered it. When he talks about
Lincoln's high regard for compromise, Obama expresses his
shared belief in the "certainty of uncertainty",
as the NYM profile puts it. Obama evinces a tragic sense,
an acceptance of humanity's many unreconciled and irreconcilable
conflicts. It's the sign of a mature moral imagination, cognizant
of its own necessary incompleteness. This kind of language
makes me feel like I'm being addressed as a thinking adult.
I'm not used to being addressed in such a manner by mainstream
politicians. I've certainly never experienced it listening
to Al Gore or Hillary Clinton. I like this feeling, and I
think other people will too when they hear more of it.
Does this mean Obama can go all the way in 2008? My fondest
wishes say yes, but the voice of reason says not this time,
probably more like the election after next. I don't think
we as a nation are anywhere near ready for Obama's face, much
less his name. The most depressing part of the NYM profile
is the part about the founder of Republicans
For Obama:
Of course, not all Republicans like Obama - John Martin
receives a steady stream of rude e-mails. "Hi John,
Just wanted to let you know that there aren't Republicans
for Obama Hussein Barack," one woman wrote. "Please
remove me from your mailing list and get over your white
guilt."
My instinct is to bare my teeth at this person - where does
she step off, thinking she can talk like that about my tribespeople!
Obama seems to have this instinct under much better control
than I do, and I have it under better control than most people
I know. Obama would engage this enraged conservative, seeking
"areas of convergence" as he puts it, bases for
building a human relationship. In fact, rereading this paragraph,
it inspires me to try to imagine this woman behind the hateful
email. What is her life like? How can she be so angry at someone
she'd probably like if they met socially? She probably has
a variety of legitimate reasons for being so pissed off, even
if she's expressing those legitimate feelings inappropriately.
Her life is almost certainly harder than mine. How can I be
presume to judge her? And now I'm not angry anymore, just
sad. Sadness is a much better starting point for empathy than
anger is.
If there's any way we're all going to get along as the planet
gets more crowded, I think Obama's is the only way forward.
There's too much plutonium sitting around in poorly guided
missile silos for us to continue to indulge our hardwired
tribal instincts. Here's to the tribe of no tribe, and the
ideology of no ideology! Obama in '16!
© ethan hein 2007 | back
to memebase | back to top