chelidon

...which begs the question, is there such a thing as wrongousness? (and if so, I know a few folks, in Washington and elsewhere, who embody it ;>)

Musings from a comment in a friend's journal...

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From recent experience both personal and global, I have come to believe that there are few more pernicious or corrupting influences to the spirit of basic humanity than blind righteousness. People who are thoroughly convinced that they are "right," (whether because "god is with them," or they just "know" they're right) are capable of the most casual, horrific injustices and inhumanity to others.

One simple spiritual practice I've been trying to cultivate is to ask myself, prior to any act of consequence, "what if I'm wrong about that?" Of course, you can take that too far, and be totally paralyzed into immobility, and some truths are pretty darn obvious, but I think it's a good place to start from. With some irony, acting in good faith means not taking things on faith ;>

As Bertrand Russell said, "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

Truer words were rarely spoken.
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Which brings up a quote I may have posted here previously, by the perceptive (and late) Rollo May, probably the best known American existentialist psychologist (author of "Love and Will" and "The Cry For Myth," both very excellent books):

"Freud's concepts of resistance and repression are descriptions of the profound difficulty of "knowing thyself." Sartre's concept of "bad faith" and "good faith" is also an illustration--the dilemma of honesty with one's self lying in the fact that there is always some element of self-distortion in our acts and beliefs. The man who thinks he is in "good faith" is at that point in "bad faith," and the only way to be in "good faith" is to know that you are in bad faith, i.e., to know that there is some element of distortion and illusion in your perception. The moral problem is not simply a matter of believing in one's convictions and acting on them, for people's convictions can be as dominating and destructive, if not more so, than mere pragmatic positions. The moral problem is the relentless endeavor to find one's own convictions and at the same time to admit that there will always be in them an element of self-aggrandizement and distortion. Here is where Socrates' principle of humility is essential..."
-- Rollo May, _Love and Will

Which hits a nail on the head. Righteousness is a form of total blindness, one symptom of which is arrogance, and an inability or unwillingness to consider or accomodate other points of view, other possibilities beyond one's own. It's no coincidence that righteousness and fundamentalism go together. And that humility and actual vision and enlightenment tend to go hand in hand.

I have a note in my journal from sometime in the early 90s, that reads, "the more sure you are that you're right, the more certain it is that you're wrong." The more of your own internal reality you project onto the world around you, the less information from the world around you can take in. Taken to extremes, one's world can become entirely an internal construct, a projection, a model, less and less connected to the outside world or the shared reality of other people. Followed all the way out to the edge, this is psychosis and sociopathy. Taken a little less far (perhaps), you get Pat Robertson, Osama Bin Laden, and a number of individuals in Bush's government.

No humility there. Only righteousness. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." (Yeats, of course)

Humility doesn't mean failing to act on one's convictions, and it doesn't mean not having convictions, or falling into the trap of absolute relativism. Everything is in some sense true, but also in some sense false (and in some sense both true and false, etc...). But not all truths are equally valid. In the context of a particular place, time and set of circumstances, some truths are more true than others. And the only way to know one from the other is to listen, to hold a stance of flexibility, motion, and humility, and to be willing to be wrong, in order to be right.

A final quote:

"No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly. Only in such a balance could humility be found, humility which was a lucid speed to welcome lucidity whenever and wherever it presented itself. . .Balance--and movement in balance, as an eagle sails up on the wind--this was the truth of life, and beauty in life."
--Charles Williams, _The Place of the Lion_