Gold Coins and Ladders

What are the use of ideas?

One way of looking at human inquiry is to see it as a sort of accumulation, a process that looks a lot like filling a treasure chest with gold coins. In this image each gold coin represents one fact, one discrete chunk of absolute truth that is valuable independently of all the other gold coins in the chest. One gold coin might represent “grass is green”, another might represent “1+1=2”, etc. You could discover that grass is not in fact green (and take that gold coin out of the chest) without it having anything to do at all with whether or not 1+1=2. Each fact/coin remains valuable forever once it is placed in the chest - it doesn’t matter whether it was placed in the chest yesterday or 1000 years ago. The goal of human inquiry (and maybe human life in general) is to fill our treasure chests with gold coins of facts, and to be a smart person means to have a high number of gold coins ready to spend.

A different way of looking at human inquiry, one which I much prefer, is to think of ideas less as things to accumulate so much as things to use. Ideas which may be useful and valuable in one context or historical period may not be so useful and valuable in another. In fact, using an idea can actually lead to it becoming no longer useful, like a ladder becomes no longer useful once one has climbed up beyond its top rung. I want to hang up a mirror on my wall, so I use my hammer to pound in a nail on which the mirror can hang, and then I set the hammer aside. 

What I prefer about this second way of looking at things is the compassion and mercy that it makes available. We can look back at previous historical epochs, and at previous selves that we have been in our own individual lives, and react with something else besides frustration and disgust. We were doing the best that we could with the tools that we had at the time - perhaps we have since discovered better tools for those purposes, or perhaps we have achieved what we were out to accomplish, or perhaps we’ve moved on to new goals entirely. Either way, nothing was missing back then. And if we can assert that nothing was missing in the past then we can assert that nothing is missing now, that there is not some great Truth that we are somehow shamefully missing out on. Other people who disagree with us are not ridiculously deficient - they are just out to play a different game with their lives than we are, and that’s totally ok. We need to find agreement or exercise power in the areas where our worlds overlap, but nobody has any right to dictate what another person believes to be true. 

“Is this assertion Ultimately True?” isn’t a question that I think we have the ability to really answer. All we can really know is whether or not our contemporaries let us get away with believing something. It seems to me to be way more useful to move from asking “is this Ultimately True?” to asking “what new things does this belief make possible?”. For me, making more compassion and mercy possible is a great reason to prefer one image to another one - I see overcoming cruelty, to one’s self and to the rest of the world, as the highest moral calling available to us. Any step in that direction is the best one we can make.