What if our way of knowing the world--our epistemology--were based more on what we would like to have happen in the world than what has happened? What if the way we thought about the world and the tools we used to access it were encoded with an implicit--or explicit--moral order? It wouldn't have to be too overbearing or specific. It might be as simple as: "do no harm" or "be nice" or "look for good." To some degree we already do this, but it seems that focusing on the historical record and the materially observable present limit what we can know about the world.
In the first, a historical perspective reveals the long cycles and processes of history--change in the past. There is nothing inherently unhopeful about this view. However, inertia is a powerful thing and there are several massive gravities flying quickly through our long and short histories. Primary among them I think of war. Certainly war is not a single lump of stuff like a planet or a simple Newtonian body. However, it is a vast collection of those things, among others. This leaves us with a plethora of conventional wisdom that says that war is inevitable and inexorable as it has characterized human history for quite a while. This strand also allows the sloppy slide into social darwinism which elevates--or demotes--social processes to the level of biological mutation and selection. For our more aggressive neighbors, life and history is a process of the strong surviving. To be fair to the historians I love and respect, history is also way of seeing what has worked and what has not in order to figure out how to do things better in the present and future. For radical historians, it is about figuring out how the stories we know about the past are nasty ways of hiding oppression, violence, and abuse. Worse, those stories may perpetuate the nastiness. History is fantastic for what it tells us about our past and about what we think about our past. For many history is a chronicle of facts. It is this view that I cannot countenance. It is this view--by far the most common way of thinking about history--that leads to me to condemn the hegemony of looking backwards.
So that brings us to the present. Here we are, kind of. Things are good; things are bad. Things are. How do we know these things? Well, we have very powerful instruments for knowing the world. First, we have our senses--are there five or six? Then we have microscopes, telescopes, orthoscopes, and a bunch of other scopes for seeing the world closer and in better focus. There is direct perception like so. Then there is the cascade of inferential knowledge that we have built on the regimentation of that direct perception. Inference is the principle best expressed by the old saying, "where there is smoke, there is fire." For a long time we have known that fire makes smoke. We also know that nothing else makes smoke. Therefore, when we see smoke--even if we cannot see the fire--we know the fire is there. Another example is a piece of iron in a lab or anywhere for that matter. If we see a piece of iron that has rusted we can
infer that there is oxygen. We can't see the oxygen, but we know it is there because we know that oxygen and iron make rust. Thanks to microscopes, we can actually see that happen. We don't have to infer anymore. But what about those things that we cannot see directly and cannot infer based on previous direct perception? How do we know those things? Perhaps they don't exist. However, I would like to argue that there are many things that we don't see--and perhaps can't see--that do exist.
There are a bunch of questions that pop out of this one and I invite those questions from regular or occasional or even random readers.
The first one that I will bring up--and then let this thread go where it will--is the question of who? This shocks me as much as it does you, I am sure. Recently, I have been working on Where in a big way and continue to do so. Where--in this case--is perhaps best answered by who. In the case of the nagas, there is a being--an existant--known directly and inferentially in South Asia that is seemingly inaccessible by our ways of knowing the world. Traditional "Western" (god, i hate that term) empirics--ways of experiencing--are not capable of knowing that nagas exist.
It may be logically impossible to know something that is neither directly perceived nor inferred. But, what if it is only one group of people that fails to do so? What if there is another group of people who does one or both of those things? How would we go about knowing what is going on in that group's knowledge system?
For all this talk about existence, etc. I have to admit that the existence of nagas or any other being--for that matter--is only as interesting as it says something about our world and how we live in it. It is more important that nagas exist as a category of practice for some folks than that they exist as magical beings in the water that surrounds us everywhere.
So this is where I would like to suggest an epistemology of hope. History and Science try their best to be fair and balanced--like FOX News, I hear. This is wonderful. However, as far as accounting for our future and for the depth of humanity and the world we inhabit, I far prefer to think a bit broader. Why exclude ways of thinking about the world that may lead us somewhere happier, healthier, with a bit less suffering?
