Very cool…

A friend of mine on Facebook found this for me, after I’d posted the ad with the song last week… Too awesome!

Edited to add: The song is New Soul, the artist is Yael Naim, and you can find it here.

Insider vs. outsider perspectives

A friend of mine recently was taking a class on comparative religions, for which he had to write an essay about his personal belief system and about belief systems in general. He asked the question, “How can I evaluate someone’s faith from the outside and have it mean anything?” I thought his question was interesting. I wasn’t sure, at the time, what it was about the question that piqued my interest, but as I’ve been considering it over the past few weeks, I realize that question is at the heart of most of the questions that plague us in postmodern life in general.

How can I evaluate another person’s experience from the outside, and have it mean anything? How can I have a meaningful response to anything that I haven’t personally experienced? If my response to anyone else’s personal experience is meaningless, doesn’t it follow that their response to my experience is also meaningless? And if only my own personal response to my own personal experience is meaningful, then how can there be any meaning at all on a greater scale? If only personal experience is relevant, then aren’t we all just a collection of individuals, living out separate existences, unable to connect to anyone else in any time or place other than in the times in which our personal experiences of a shared moment come together for a time?

That’s the paradox of existentialism… and the answer of the existentialists was, in essence, that life is absurd, so we should just embrace the absurdity and get on with our (meaningless) lives. But that’s not a natural state for us to live in, so we seek out times when we feel the greatest connection — the greatest sense of shared experience — with others. We seek out the highs of falling in love, the depth of the bond with family members. That shared experience can be the only place in which there is shared meaning… Or can it?

You see, I’m not sure I believe that meaning can be derived only from an insider view of personal experience. In my own experience, I’ve found that being too close to something, to someone, inevitably leads me to make faulty calls. For instance, upon observation of people that I hardly know and care little about, I can be very accurate about who they are, what motivates them, and how they operate. I can “type” them (personality typing) with a fairly high degree of accuracy. But when I get too close, through knowing and caring about someone, my ability to see who they are actually diminishes. I start projecting my own expectations on them, who I want them to be, who I think they are because of who I am around them, and things like that. Inevitably, closeness hampers my ability to see what’s really happening.

Let’s follow this through, then. Maybe the only hope that you have on an accurate diagnosis of who you are, what you believe, how you’re living… maybe that only can be accurately measured by a true outsider. Maybe there has to be an objectivity there in order to measure the meaning. If so, that would mean that it is necessary to have an objective outsider there to clearly see what it is you do, how you think, what you believe, etc. People lie — to themselves as much as (or more than) they do to others. We’re always rationalizing to ourselves why we did what we did, why we want what we want… and sometimes we share those rationalizations with other people, sometimes not. But it takes an outsider, a therapist maybe, or a confessor, to look at us and tell us that we’re being illogical, we’re twisting things in order to look good to ourselves.

Maybe true meaning can only be found in outsider evaluations. You want that insider connection, the shared experience, for a sense of place in life, but if you want a sense of purpose, a measure of what you’ve done and where you’re going, someone who can see you clearly is much more able to do that for you. Someone who loves you is likely to evaluate your past experience in terms of their hopes and dreams for you… which may or may not correspond with your own. Maybe the only true way to judge a religion — or a culture — is to get a group of outsiders together to evaluate it. Anyone from the inside is going to see it in terms of what they want it to be. And while that’s valuable information, it’s also misleading information, because their own hopes and fears color their experience of what they believe.

Funny — I can recognize what I’m saying as my attempt to take a logical, scientific approach to things that are illogical by nature. But then, in our continual attempts to personalize science, aren’t we committing the opposite fallacy?

Hmmm. I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’ll have to think it through a little more. All I seem to have done here is confuse myself further.