Thanking the Mailman & Other Positivist Eccentricities

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a loyal Apple customer. Too loyal, some might add, as I use even the built-in calendar app and my iCloud email account. The hype right now is around the iPhone X, and yes, I want one. Whatever, I am not ashamed.

If, one day, out of the blue, I received one in the mail, what would I do?

I would thank the mailman of course, he just delivered me a material good that I had been thirsting for. Thank you, mailman.

Clearly, he is the explanation, justification, and conclusion for this iPhone X.

After signing the papers, thanking the mailman, and maybe giving him a hug, I’d throw the box away (not look for a return address), and enjoy my iPhone X. And if anyone asked me where/how I’d gotten it or who kept paying for my data (and other logistics), I would just shrug and say, look, all I know is that I wanted this thing and a mailman brought it to me. And you know what? As any other normal human being with rational faculties would do, I asked no questions about it, attributed it all to the mailman, thanked him, and my business ended there. Good day my sir.

Are you tired of this long-winded metaphor yet (I hope you know it’s a metaphor)? Because I am. And not because it’s boring, but because it’s absurd to even write it out. Because it’s so unnatural. We don’t act like this – at least, not in our immediate daily lives. If we get mail, we look for who sent it, why they sent it. We reach out to them if we can, we thank them.

But at the same time, we do act like this, subconsciously. Every second of our lives, we are getting things that we don’t question. Or we question, but not wholly. We explain some things, but leave a host of questions unanswered.

It's as if you ask about my iPhone X, and I tell you how the mail delivery system works in the United States. And you keep asking, but who’s it from? Why did they send it to you? And I keep telling you – look, that doesn’t matter! What matters is that the system works, and I got the iPhone. Why are you asking so many [useless] questions?

And of course, you’re simply befuddled at this situation. Right? (You better be.)

Some examples of things we take for granted and partially understand are: being able to breathe, abundance of water, perfect gravitational constant, enjoying diversity of life in every way possible, colors, flavors, people who love you, etc.

We kind of understand the HOW – oxygen, the water cycle, rocks bumping into each other in space for thousands of years, evolution, light rays and reflections, taste buds and saliva, serotonin and oxytocin blah blah blah…

But where from? WHY?

To survive? That’s a low-quality argument and you know it. It’s circular. It’s always one-step behind. Where did the original singularity come from? Why do these things work? 

This what our current scientific enterprise does. JUST FYI. I promise I am not an anti-science conspiracy theorist that lives in an underground cave. I am just tired of repeating the same thing – science doesn’t answer our why questions. It answers our how questions. 

So no, science can’t answer questions about ethics. (I will fight Sam Harris on this but that’s another post waiting to be written). No, science can’t tell me where I can find meaning in my life. The "why?" is where all the juicy answers about meaningful living are! And I think more of us need to be digging there.

Without further ado, I present you Exhibit A.I, II, III of this blogpost:

Exhibit A shows three screencaps from the recent Doctor Strange movie. I watched it about a month ago and loved it because despite the alien elements, in its core, it is so quintessentially human.

The movie follows Dr. Stephen Strange, an extremely successful neurosurgeon, who gets into a terrible car crash that severely damages his hands and thus prevents him from performing any more surgeries. Early in the movie, he claims, “My work is at least going to save thousands for years to come.”

Of course, all that work is cut short once he loses the precision he had in his hands. After some experimental studies and hopeless physical therapy, he eventually finds his way to Nepal. He meets with the Ancient One who asks him, “When you reattach a severed nerve, is it you who heals it back together or the body?”

Your cells are not aware of you. Your atoms, your electrons – they don’t know they are a part of you. We say they are “programmed” to work a certain way – but we skip the part where there is no guarantee that they will follow through with their programming.

Against this backdrop, let me pull up Exhibit B.

It doesn’t matter if the doctor had 30+ years of training, and the most advanced technological tools available to him. There is no guarantee that a patient will heal or survive after his operation. Sometimes, doctors do all that they can, and there is still no luck. And sometimes, they think there is no chance of recovery but a miracle (!) happens.

Concurrence and causality are not the same thing. Problem of induction, remember? Just like there is no assurance that when you plant a seed and water it, it will bloom – there is no guarantee that a doctor performing an operation will help you.

These exhibits aren’t connected simply because they are both about doctors by the way, they are part of the same gallery because of bigger implications about where human ambition and lack of insight fits into the bigger picture.

What the doctor case shows me is that we want to take credit for things that don’t really belong to us. Whether it be healing someone or writing a poem, we have to admit that there is an element that’s beyond us. You do your part (as a doctor, a writer, a farmer) but the rest is outside of your domain of control.

I survive open-heart surgery and thank the doctor. The doctor thinks they (alone) saved me. When in reality, the doctor is the mailman (who likes taking credit for my iPhone X despite not knowing or wondering where it came from), and me? – I am the short-sighted receiver who asks no questions.

I hope we escape these trivialities soon. I am leaving you with a beautiful Rumi poem. 

“Who Says Words With My Mouth?

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry, I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.”

Indeed, these are the questions of the century – Who is saying words with my mouth? Who is looking out with my eyes?

Who keeps sending me these packages? And why? What am I supposed to learn from them?

Lots of stamps,

Belle

Socrates and Me(no)

Ever since my social studies teacher in middle school (shout-out to Ms. Bergeron) taught me that while I took notes for class, I could have a “notes to myself” section as well – I have been using it as a technique to gather snippets of inspiration, questions, and general other musings in my journals. (My N2S headings are where half my blog ideas come from, so again, thank you Ms. Bergeron).

This quarter, I took a class called Ancient Philosophy and I have a lot of margin notes that are highlighted and circled over and over again so that I don’t forget to write about them. In this post, I want to talk about the Meno (read here) – a Socratic dialogue that tries to answer what virtue is and how it can be acquired.

Now, you might think – we get it… you are a philosophy major.  But, please bear through my pretension for a few minutes, because I want to make the case for you today, that everyone, every single person, who claims to believe in anything or has any sort of conviction, should read the Meno. Meno and most other short Socratic dialogues are pretty accessible (not accessible like, you can find them in the public domain (which you can) but accessible like, easy to understand – unlike most philosophical writings today.)

Anyway – you should read the Meno, and here’s why:

In the dialogue, while Socrates and Meno try to hash out what kind of a thing virtue is, they end up with two contradictory conclusions (not surprising in a Socratic dialogue). One argument says virtue is knowledge, and the other argument says virtue is not knowledge. Our focus here is not on virtue, but rather knowledge.

Now, we seem to be in a quandary. Socrates and Meno return to their original question of how one acquires virtue. Is it through experience or is it something that can be taught? If virtue is teachable, then it must be a kind of knowledge, but there are no apparent teachers of it – so the problem keeps growing.   

Socrates and Meno realize that perhaps people don’t need knowledge to act virtuously (or to act well). If one has knowledge, one can act well – but if one has true opinion, one can act just as well.

At the end of the day, if you are at a fork in the road, both true opinion and knowledge would be able to guide you in the right direction. BUT Socrates tells Meno that knowledge is obviously preferable to true opinion. At this point, we need to ask why? If both true opinion and knowledge can guide you to do the right thing in a situation, then why would one be preferable to the other?

Socrates explains by way of analogy. Let’s say you own a very nice house with a beautiful garden out front. And there is a majestic statue in the middle of it. True opinion is having the statue there by itself, and knowledge is having that statue tied down.

The problem isn’t that if you have the statue without a stake in the ground it’s more susceptible to disappearing (as if it will come to life and run away, or be stolen in the dead of night). It isn’t that with knowledge, you always succeed in acting well whereas with true opinion, you succeed only sometimes.

You could have the statue and it could stay there your whole life. You could always have true opinion. You could always know what to do to act well. It doesn’t seem all that important to have knowledge instead of true opinion. You still always do the right and virtuous thing! Yet Socrates insists, but if permanence isn’t the issue… then what is?

What is the difference between the statue that’s tied down, and the statue that’s always going to be there?

The answer is ownership. What matters isn’t that the statue stays in your garden, it’s that the statue is yours!

We are all living the same reality. The thoughts we have, they aren’t always ours. Sometimes, our morals (those true opinions) are shaped outside of us, they don’t really belong to us.

And sometimes, we can even lead other people with those borrowed thoughts. And we are virtuous as far as we are useful in guiding those people. But those thoughts don’t benefit us.

To have thoughts of our own, that’s hard work. But it’s the only way they are valuable.

So what’s the point? Why does it matter for everyone to read the Meno? Tie this back to the thesis Nur Banu! (this is a preemptive pun, so appreciate it in advance)

My original margin note is that this is the difference between faith by imitation, and faith by verification. We usually believe things because our parents, friends, or communities believe those things. And those things can be good but they aren’t ours until we question and inquire and prod and poke on our own to affirm or reject them.

The Meno is a must-read for everyone who claims to believe in something, because it makes you question whether your statues are simply in the garden, or tied to the ground.

PS: A serendipitous finding here is that the word for ‘creed’ in Arabic is aqeedah – and it is used to refer to the fundamentals of belief. Linguistically, ‘aqeedah’ comes from the root A-K-D which means to “tie down, fasten.” Isn’t that amazing? We are tying down our beliefs by making sure they are our own, and making sure that we are certain of them. 

Lots of balloons, 

Belle

A Planetary System of Epic (re: Human) Proportions

Today is the 5th year anniversary of my blog! I have been writing and sharing online for the past five years and I want to thank everyone who has read even a sentence.

This blog post is about living with friend anxiety.

If you know me in real life, you have probably have heard me talk about how I had a girl gang when I was in elementary school. We were 15 girls in a class of 40, and I realized early on, I needed to seize the power, the popularity, and the reins in the class if I wanted to be happy. I was an only child; you can’t blame me.

In first grade, I was chosen class president, and this was only second week of school. So you can see, I was an influencer+ before LinkedIn was even conceived. To be fair to my younger self, I was a notorious boy-hater but I always loved, valued, and supported all my girl friends. When you’re outnumbered, you don’t have time to put down other girls. You gotta build them up, like an army.

And that’s kind of what I did. During recess and PE, the girls and I would go to a pre-determined corner of the schoolyard and have boot camp. I was a benevolent dictator – they didn’t get to play hopscotch and tag whenever they wanted, but they built stamina, strategy, and scheming wits while I trained them.

Where did I get my training? Books and movies. As they say, you have to learn from other people’s mistakes, not your own. In any case, the moral of this prelude is that:

1. I had a lot of friends that I loved who loved me back (loved and feared for some, but loved for the most part)
2. I had them all throughout elementary school!

Fast forward to me starting 6th grade in a foreign country, a foreign school, and basically no friends whatsoever.

Before I get into a more dramatic retelling of this story, let me just say, when you go from class-president-for-five-years-in-a-row to newcomer-with-no-friends-or-english your entire personality and sense of self takes a hit.

Anyway, we all know middle school is hell, unless you’re a bully. If you’re a bully, your life is hell which is why you’re acting out, but your life in school isn’t hell. It’s actually quite bearable. I was not a bully. I was also not ready to be bullied (I don’t think anyone is but all I am saying is – I had never been bullied before).

And not just bullied, but bullied by GIRLS? The very people I trusted? People I thought were supposed to be by my side while we conspired against boys?

Alas – how the tables had turned. Girls were mean to me, and why? BECAUSE OF BOYS?

Can you believe this?

So, naturally, I started doubting everything I knew and entered into a weird state of depression and self-loathing which still remains with me today, albeit faded now, but still there.

By the end of my three-year middle school career, I emerged as a misanthropic and self-doubting girl of a human being, who was extremely insecure and unable to trust anyone and had no close friends whatsoever.

Deeper into the well of misery we go:

High school could have been a remedy. I was emotionally closed off for an entire year, but I did end up making a few really great friends. I thought I was back in my element, ready to ride the waves, and rise, like a second coming of Nur Banu.

I was shut down pretty quickly though, perhaps a divine chastisement. During senior year, my two best friends ditched me. And by ditch I mean: they found –what I considered at the time – better people than me, and thus disposed of me since I no longer served any function.

This is a terrible to mindset to ever have, and I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemies. But here were the repercussions. I thought:

1. that I was easily disposable
2. that my friends could cut me out of their lives without explanation
3. that I didn’t even deserve an explanation
4. that, because there were no warning signs, this could happen to me pretty much with any friendship anywhere at anytime
5. that I had no inherently good qualities that made me a desirable friend

So, this is how I come to college. And college isn’t easy. If you’ve seen some of what I have posted before, you’ve seen that I’ve been struggling with having security in my friendships.

Last week I realized why (as I was talking to my psychologist).

I used to see myself as a constant before, but for a long time, I hadn’t. I was just floating in a void and begging for people to think of me as a friend so that I could see some value in myself.

Being your own constant means, you are like a planet in your own orbit. Or a star journeying across space. And every other person in your life is also a planet or a star: they come in and out of your range. Or maybe they are like a comet, they speed past you once and leave a trail of light behind. Either way, you are ultimately an entity by yourself. Dynamic and changing, and always in motion, but a source of your own light and luminosity.

And together, you have systems and galaxies and they are all analogies for cosmic friendships and cosmic families.

Just cosmic love. If we can harness it.

PS: My best friends and I are back to being best friends. Turns out they were having bad times and they regret ditching me. Which is nice I guess. Forgiven, but not forgotten. 

Lots of raindrops,

Belle