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Basing
models of reality on history and science, formed from thousands of facts and empirical evidence, remain as relative
paradigms, allowing continual revision and changes as new data develops, changes, grows and evolves.
Models
of reality built on faith as absolute truth, must accommodate contradictory data by rationalizing their system
with increasingly complex and convoluted structures, until it becomes an end in itself, a fragile tower of thought
that bears little resemblance to reality.
Truth is characterized by relative nature, humor, participatory democracy under moderate rule of law, multi-paradigm economics, tolerance, inclusivity, pluralism, multiculturalism, paradox & the ability to contain contradictions. Absolutes are measured under the relative nature pertaining to each individual circumstance.
Falsity can be detected by absolutism, fundamentalism, orthodoxy, monism, certainty, exclusiveness, Manichean dualism, demonization of opposing viewpoints, conspiratorial themes, determined plans, one-sidedness and the failure to integrate the whole.
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WALT WHITMAN |
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JOHN KEATS |
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In Walt Whitman's poem, Song Of Myself, he writes, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."
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ALLEN GINSBERG |
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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE |
Allen Ginsberg in an 1988 interview, answers his one-sided interviewer's attack on Whitman with the following: Whitman is saying that our own minds are so vast that we can wind up contradicting ourselves without having to freak out about it. It's very similar to what the poet John Keats said about "negative capability." Keats said the quality of a very great poet like Shakespeare was his ability to contain opposite ideas in the mind "without an irritable reaching out after fact and reason." Meaning that the portion of the mind, which judges and irritably insists on either black or white is only a small part of the mind. The larger mind observes the contradictions and contains them. The mind that notices that it contradicts itself is bigger than the smaller mind that is taking one side or the other." - ALLEN GINSBERG, Spontaneous Minds, p. 485
The ability to contain contradictions does not have to reside in blind relativism or be the "doublethink" that George Orwell writes in his novel, 1984, in which he describes the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, accepting both into a relativity of falsity and incongruence. Instead, the acceptance of contradictions are accepted while maintaining core values towards unity. Their absoluteness becomes challenged upon each individual and particular circumstance, which like a fingerprint, is never exactly the same. There is a huge difference between the absolutes in pragmatism that compartmentalizes towards peace, community and unity; and that of mindless relativism.