So the world thinks we are wrong... Who cares?

Do we really care what other people think about us? When I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak last year, at a lecture at the Ohio State University, he quoted Susan Sonntag, saying something about a theory that roughly twenty percent of the population can decide for themselves to practice “good” behavior or to practice “evil” behavior and that this percentage is equally distributed; but the other eighty percent of us, can go either way depending on which side is louder in its appeals to our reason. I would like to place myself in the ten percent that chooses “good” most of the time, but I acknowledge that even that action shows me defining myself by someone else’s behavioral theory and thus, quite possibly, places me in the eighty percent that follows. This causes me to wonder if it is even possible for me to make choices based on my instinct alone; and then I wonder if my even my “instinct” is influenced by outside forces.

Postmodernists often posit that we can never truly be ourselves. Everything we know is based upon an agreed upon collective by others, which, if we are truly honest, could be wrong. Just because the light switch has turned the light on every day we have flipped it, does not mean it will turn on tomorrow. The bulb could burn out, there could be a short in the wire, or the cosmos might shift and unmake everything we have come to understand… I know it is far-fetched, and that a lightbulb is an over simplified metaphor for something that is so big, but no one can possibly tell me with complete certainly that the cosmos will never shift. It is something that cannot be known. Thus, everything we think we know is based on the principle that it has worked so far.

Like everything else, what most would consider “decent” behavior is based upon this very same uncertain structure. Barring theological discussions that would presume that a moral pattern has been set in motion by a creator, and focusing on just what we can experience tangibly in our day to day lives, we assume certain modes of behavior in order to get through our interactions with others as smoothly as possible. This behavior is learned to fit in with the people we want to associate with. We adopt their mannerisms in order to gain their acceptance. We justify our experience by how we relate it to others, so it should follow that yes, we do care what people think about us.

So what do we make of the fact that the majority of the world is now turning against what America is doing in Iraq. If decent behavior is defined what the majority of other people think, how will we, in our everyday lives react to this world majority disagreeing with our government’s decisions? What do those decisions say about us as individuals? As Americans, do we stick by our government as the thing that defines what binds us as a country and reject the behavior models that the rest of the civilized world is agreeing on?

Returning to the possibly theological/philosophical discussion of what motivates us to seek decency: I wonder just how important it is to listen to our instincts and learn to separate our own voices from the noise caused by the voices of others. Are the postmodernists right and we cannot possibly separate our true selves from the noise? Or, ignoring the argument that a “true self” does not exist, can our honest attempt at trusting the “decency” that is inside us still lead us in a direction that would better our world?

It is now time to start thinking outside of the box. The majority of Americans seem to have trouble with trying to define themselves by anything not American. We tend to see ourselves as privileged and outside of the rest of the world’s judgment because of the high-minded ideologies our country was founded upon - ideologies, I might add, that we fail to live up to on an hourly basis. Like a sophomoric adolescent, we forget that the cultures, the parents, which have spawned us, have seen and experienced things that we have not. There are and will be times when we can and should learn from their wisdom and right now is one of those times. There is something that feels very wrong about what the Bush Administration is doing in Iraq. When I quiet the noise and listen to my breathing, when I meditate on connecting myself to something bigger than me, bigger than the government, bigger than the things that unify the people in this country, something that connects me with my fellow man no matter where he comes from, I feel that something is wrong.