REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOD LIFE - Part 6

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

This column, which you will read on Easter Sunday, will end our summary of reflections from the book “The Good Life,” by Australian author, Hugh Mackay, who was elected a fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and awarded honorary doctorates by several universities for his pioneering work in social research.

Chapter 6, Living the Good Life, starts with his observation that “the desire to be taken seriously is the most ubiquitous, the most pervasive of all our social desires.”  It is connected to the desire to belong to human herds and tribes, the desire to belong to a place and the desire for love.

“Each person wants to be acknowledged, respected, appreciated, understood, valued and accepted,” he asserts. “Though we know we are all part of the same human story, we each want our unique role in it to be recognized. We each want our voice to be heard.”

The frustration in this desire to be taken seriously is the most difficult to handle because it is the desire “that goes to the heart of where we are.” Such frustration can “boil over into anger, violence or even war: observe the behavior of entire nations who feel their rights or needs are being ignored or, at the extreme, that their territory is being violated. Ethnic or religious minorities typically act badly when they feel marginalized or undervalued.”

We feel irritated or insulted by something seemingly insignificant as a waiter’s failure to notice us or if someone is late for an appointment. “When people are being cranky, sullen, withdrawn or antisocial, they are often expressing nothing more than the frustration of their desire to be taken seriously. That applies to children, adolescents, young adults, people in their middle years, the elderly – at every point in the life cycle, we are powerfully driven by this desire.”

The author adds: “That’s why we react so badly to being mocked, exploited or humiliated; when we are made to feel we are not worthy of someone’s respect, it feels like a sign that we are not being taken seriously.”

People resent “being lumped in with a category, as though we are mere stereotypes: baby boomers, single mothers, refugees, Jews, Muslims, the wealthy or the unemployed. It’s why we hate other people making assumptions about us – without first consulting us. It’s why we plead for space in a relationship when we feel we are no longer being taken seriously enough.”

The author wonders that if this is true for all, “why is it hard for us to acknowledge that it’s the same for everyone else? If the good life is a life committed to treating others as we ourselves would like to be treated, then it’s a life committed to taking others seriously … and showing them that we do?”

He says there’s a paradox “at the heart of the good life: we are at our best when we are striving to give others the very things we ourselves most desire: respect, recognition, kindness and even happiness.” We are at our worst “when we criticize others for the very frailties and shortcomings we ourselves possess.”

The lesson he wants to impart is the same paradox as in the pursuit of happiness: to pursue our own happiness is to risk misery, frustration and disappointment, but to devote ourselves to the happiness and wellbeing of others is likely to enhance our own sense of wellbeing and fulfillment.

A life lived for others or the simple matter of thinking about others when we speak or act is a key ingredient of the good life. Observes the author:

“None of this requires superhuman strength, integrity or saintliness: it calls only for a little humility, the antithesis of arrogance. It is the sign that we have finally grasped an important aspect of goodness: that we cannot parade it as we might parade our wealth or our sporting prowess; goodness can be discerned only in its effects on others.

“In an era of wildly extravagant self-promotion and unhealthy emphasis on self-esteem, humility has taken something of a back seat (though that’s its natural position, of course).

“Humility doesn’t involve flagellating yourself, demeaning yourself or losing your self-respect; it involves only shifting your primary focus from your own wellbeing to the wellbeing of others. It also involves a certain hesitancy in responding to praise, because humility acknowledges the role of genetics, luck and circumstance in any of our accomplishments. Modesty is the natural partner of humility.”

Mackay makes the point that we cannot be selective in efforts to lead the good life:

“If a good life is marked by kindness, tolerance, compassion, respect for others and a willingness to respond to their needs, then that kind of commitment can’t be confined to one compartment of our lives. To say that a person is kind and loving at home or with their friends but a ruthless, exploitative operator at work is to say that this person is not committed to the good life. Being kind to the people we love is hardly a moral challenge. Our commitment to the good life is tested by our response to circumstances in which it is hardest for us to live up to the Golden Rule.”

In whatever job we do, “the good life demands that we behave at work as we behave in our private life; that we draw no ethical distinction between the two; that goodness becomes the touchstone, the hallmark, the benchmark for everything we do.”

Practical tips on how to lead the good life abound in religious and philosophical teachings, as well as folklore and cultural traditions. Some of these include the following:

-Support those in difficulty or distress.

-Don’t dissemble or deceive.

-Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

-Be kind to strangers.

-Suffer fools gladly.

-Turn the other cheek.

-Go the extra mile.

-Befriend the friendless.

-Live in peace.

-Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.

-Don’t meet hate with hate or violence with violence.

-It’s more blessed to give than to receive.

The author considers all these as snippets of wisdom meant to promote mental and emotional health in those whose lives we touch from day to day. The practical question is: how do we provide support to others to help ensure sound mental and emotional health -

“So the question is, what might we do in the ebb and flow of normal daily existence to increase the quotient of goodness in our lives? Or, to put it another way, how might we best satisfy other people’s need for therapeutic support? If the word ‘therapy’ strikes you as odd, consider this: we are  all struggling with the frailty, flaws and failings that go with being human, which is why we all need emotional support and guidance to see us through the dark and difficult passages of our lives. (What’s that, in not therapy?) Our sense of emotional security depends on knowing such therapeutic support is available when we need it.”

Mackay notes that sometimes when things are too rocky, too complex or too private to share with friends … we seek the help of a psychotherapist or counsellor. “But most of us, most of the time, get by with the support of a loving family … the concern of friends or the strength of a caring community. In this sense, we are all, sooner or later called upon to be each other’s therapist.”

Towards the end of the book, he reiterates this message: “Goodness is not a grand or mysterious concept. All we require are a few simple disciplines that, like compass settings, steer us in the right direction. In every case, those disciplines will be based on the idea of treating others as we ourselves would like to be treated, putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes, trying to see the world from the other person’s point of view.”

Then the author proceeds to discuss what he calls the three great therapies of life:  to listen attentively; to apologize sincerely; and to forgive generously. Actually, he adds a fourth: Make ‘em laugh! For comments, email: npestelos@gmail.com ###

NMP/24 March 2016/6.53 p.m.

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOD LIFE -Part 5

For The Bohol Tribune 5

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

For this week’s column, we again present the thoughts of noted Australian author and newspaper columnist, Hugh Mackay, contained in his book, “The Good Life,” one of the 14 books he has written in the field of social psychology and ethics .

The book was a gift from a close friend and high school classmate, Sydney-based Milwida Sevilla-Reyes, one of the many she has given me over the past 58 years since our graduation from the old Quezon High in Lucena City. For the past several weeks, I have been recycling my gratitude to her by sharing Mackay’s precious insights to complement Scripture-based lessons in the spirit of the Lenten season.

Now we deal with Chapter 5 of Mackay’s book which is mostly about the Golden Rule, something every fourth grader the world over must have memorized as prescribed basis for moral conduct: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Without the archaic language, the author translates it as  “ treat other people the way you would like to be treated.”

He notes: “Some people find the principle easier to grasp if it is turned around to emphasize the negative –don’t treat people in a way you would not like to be treated – as variation sometimes referred to as the Silver Rule.”

We can offer our versions but there’s plenty of guidance about the rule “from virtually every religious and ethical tradition in human history.” He notes:

“Versions of the Golden Rule appear in ancient Egypt, ancient China and ancient Greece, and in religious traditions ranging from Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism to the three Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – and newer religions such as Baha’i.  You’ll also encounter it in non-theistic religions like Buddhism, in Scientology and every form of humanism.”

No one, it seems, authored the Golden Rule: “This is not a principle that needs a god to ordain it or a religion to enshrine it: it is absolutely integral to any systematic attempt to work out how humans might best live together in peace and harmony.”

Mackay further notes:

“Six centuries before the Christian era, the ancient Greek philosopher Pittacus put it like this: ‘Do not to your neighbor what you would take ill from him’.  Socrates,  quoted in Plato’s Crito, went one step further: ‘One should never mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him.’

Mackay quotes Confucius who says: “Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” In the Hindu tradition, he says, the same idea is found in The Mahabharata, Book 13: ‘One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self.’

The author adds: ‘This is, in brief, the rule of dharma. All other behavior is due to selfish desires’. For Christians, they are familiar with what is stated in the Old Testament book of Leviticus as ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’  something echoed several times in the New Testament, explicitly in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.  The same rule is often cited in modern attempts to define universal human rights. 

The question is this: “If it’s so easy to articulate and so widely acknowledged as a good idea, why is the Golden Rule so hard to put into practice?”

In reality, the Golden Rule competes with the unwritten Law of Reciprocity which is so powerful in human affairs and quite hard to resist: “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. You listen to me and only then will I listen to you. You treat me badly and I’ll treat you badly. You damage my reputation and I’ll damage yours.”

Indeed the spirit of revenge is so seductive that it prevents the application of the Golden Rule in many instances. Mackay says that the old Jewish saying of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ has been interpreted to justify revenge “but in fact it was originally intended to convey an altogether different idea: that any punishment should precisely fit the crime – an eye, and no more than an eye, for an eye. It was a warning against over-reaction.”

To resist the urge for revenge is the acid test of our commitment to the Golden Rule. “Revenge is the ultimate perversion of the rule; it amounts to saying, I will treat you the way you’ve treated me – the opposite of treating you in the way I myself would like to be treated.”

Revenge brings us to the level of those who have wronged us by responding to bad behavior with bad behavior. “Faced with the challenge of forgiveness, negotiation,  approachment  or reconciliation, we reject all those possibilities in favor of the rawest and most simple-minded reaction. Revenge challenges the very idea of virtue.”

The author further observes that some people do not want to live by the Golden Rule because it means giving up the competitive urge, “their ambition or perhaps their sense of personal freedom and independence.” The Golden Rule requires a highly cooperative approach, “which works best when we think of ourselves primarily as individuals with independent identities” competing with each other.

The Golden Rule works best for what he calls “communitarians, humanitarians, egalitarians and peacemakers” and will be quite a challenge to those “seduced by the Western fashion for rampant, self-indulgent individualism.”

Those who think people are competitive in nature and that human story is all about winners and losers will have “trouble paying more than lip service” to the Golden Rule.

Here is the application of the Golden Rule in international relations:

“If national leaders lived by the Golden Rule, no nation would invade another. There would certainly have been an unprovoked invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany or of Iraq in 2003 by the so-called coalition of the willing … Such unprovoked invasions represent a breach of the Golden Rule so flagrant, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could keep a straight face while claiming moral justifications for them…

“Knowing what war does to the innocent civilian populations on both sides of the conflict, to a nation’s infrastructure and to the fomentation of hate, leaders committed to the Golden Rule would harness the power of diplomacy and negotiation and, when diplomatic solutions proved elusive, would accept mediation from the United Nations ..”

Politicians must follow the Golden Rule:

“In a Golden Rule world, politicians would treat their political opponents as they themselves would wish to be treated. Political debates would be marked by a spirit of courtesy based on a proper recognition of each other’s legitimacy as elected members of parliament and respect for each other’s convictions, as well as a respectful appreciation of each other’s human frailties and vulnerabilities. Politicians would take their opponents seriously, not as armies might take their enemies seriously, but as we all wish to be taken seriously in our day-to-day dealings with each other.”

How about business leaders?

“Business leaders trying to live by the Golden Rule would rate respect for their customers, employees and suppliers as highly as their respect for family and friends. They would aim to treat all those people as they themselves wish to be treated. In a Golden Rule-driven marketplace, commitment to telling the truth and transparency would be the hallmark of all transactions

How about journalists and mass media people?  

If they follow the Golden Rule, they  would “feel obliged to make only truthful assertions and would carefully distinguish between the facts as they understood them and their opinions about the facts.”

Athletes? If they follow the Golden Rule, it would end cheating in sports.

As individuals, if we follow the Golden Rule, we would not do anything to exploit, deceive or manipulate others or cut moral concerns that could disadvantage others commercially, professionally,

politically or personally.

The author points out that a recurring problem with the Golden Rule is that “ it seems too easy to think of exceptions or ways in which it could be misapplied.”  He cites this example: “What, for example, we say about workplace bullies, control freaks or narcissists who, in various ways, make life miserable for the people who work with them? Should we continue to be nice to them regardless, as the Golden Rule seems to imply?”

In the case of bad behavior, he says, “we should treat others as others would expect us to be treated if we had behaved badly as they have.”  He suggests a qualification to the Golden Rule: treat others the way you would like them to treat you, “provided that is just fair, and reasonable.”

His comment: “It doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘do not do unto others’, and it leaves open all sorts of questions about the interpretation of ‘just,  fair, and reasonable.’  But it does remind us that moral dilemmas are not always simple and straightforward, and that the context needs to be taken into account.”

Such dilemmas should not discourage us to apply the Golden Rule “as our guide in trying to work out what’s the best thing to do every situation, assuming we want to introduce a little more goodness into our lives.  Its implementation would transform the life of any community, whether a family, a neighborhood, a workplace, a school, a university or a parliament,   fostering cooperation, willingness to compromise, an unyielding attitude of respect for others and concern for their well-being.”

As a guiding principle, the Golden Rule beats revenge, unbridled self-interest and destructive competition. Although there are constraints to living by the Golden Rule, he says: “Deep in our psyche, perhaps in our DNA, is the conviction that there is no other way to live if the species is to thrive.”

Such hope and redemption is what Lent is all about for us Christians and other faiths as well. #

NMP/18 March 2016/4.21 a.m.

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOD LIFE - Part 4

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

We will resume mining gems from Hugh Mackay’s book, The Good Life, to complement our Scripture-based reflections during Lent.

For this week’s column, let me just dwell on the core idea that the Good Life is a life lived for others, something also taught by many religious leaders and philosophers through the ages.

First, to support this idea, the author reiterates a fact we all know:

 “The starting point is the recognition that we are all inseparably part of each other and that our human destiny is to accept and nurture our connections. We are each part of a larger whole: a family, a friendship circle, a neighborhood, a community, an organization, a world. Each of us is a player in the same big human drama.”

He says that we should not lose our sense of who we are nor our individuality in affirming these connections. What it means is that our context, not our essence, defines our identity . The question to ask, he says, is “Who needs me?” rather than “Who am I?”

According to the author: “Friendship, connectedness, engagement, community: these are the great life-savers, the great sources of human fulfillment. We are by nature social creatures – herd animals – and we cut ourselves off from the herd at our peril.”

Living for others does not mean living like a doormat or “being servile, subservient, or subjugated.”  It means to live life as an “open doorway, not as a doormat.” It is to live with love and all its manifestations – kindness, care, compassion, generosity, tolerance, encouragement, support.”  

Then he asks rhetorically: “If love is the ultimate source of goodness in our lives, it follows that the good life is primarily about others. What else could it be about?”

But we need to recognize this dualism in human nature: “We are members of a species that relies on cooperation, tolerance, altruism, harmony and acts of grace for its very survival. “  Unfortunately, there is another side to us:

“We humans are capable of behaving in ways that contradict each of those admirable qualities. We go to war over territorial disputes or, even more bizarrely, over conflicting religious beliefs; we lie, cheat, and compete ruthlessly with each other; we lose our temper; commit acts of violence and abuse, even against children; we take advantage of our fellows; we fail to keep our promises; and often fall short of the ideals we claim to espouse. In other words, we’re selfish by nature, as well as selfless; we’re competitive as well as cooperative; we’re flawed.”

There is contradiction in human nature:

“We want to maintain loving relationships, but we often let our desire for control interfere with them. We want to cling to our deeply held values and beliefs, but we sometimes jettison them in response to our aspiration to belong to a particular group or tribe with a different set of beliefs and values.”

He adds: “We sometimes want to be good, and we sometimes want to be bad. As a species we have shown ourselves capable of murder, rape and pillage as well as startlingly selfless acts of charity. Our racial, religious and cultural prejudices can overwhelm … and lead us into hideous expressions of intolerance, injustice, and hatred, spiraling all the way down to war and genocide. Yet we can t those prejudices and learn to love and care for those who have utterly different religious or cultural perspectives from our own.”

History tells us that “communities survive when the cooperative aspects of our nature prevail.”  Indeed human beings are born “to relate to each other and to foster communities by acknowledging and responding to each other’s needs.”

The author notes there are varied ways to describe a life which may be worthy of praise or admiration but may not contribute to the common good:

A full life : “Sounds attractive. Sounds worthwhile. No wasted time here. No meandering. No loose ends. These are the people who, in addition to holding down a job and raising a family, belong to so many organizations, sit on so many committees and seem to achieve so much …”

His comment: “Painful as it can be to admit, an overly busy life … can be a highly effective insulation from engagement with the very people who may need you to stop rushing, listen to them and take them seriously enough to spend time with them.”

A charmed life: It is life “largely dependent on accidental factors – genetics, inheritance, lucky timing.” But such a life is “not the most sympathetic environment for virtue to blossom.”

A productive life: “Plenty of creative people, including artists, scientists and philosophers, as well as high-flyers in business and the professions, have lived like that: wonderfully productive output, huge personal rewards and generous public recognition, but intensely frustrating, infuriating or destructive to those close to them, their personal relationships sacrificed at the altar of productivity.”

An authentic life: “Obviously, being inauthentic – insincere, artificial, deceitful – is usually undesirable: no one likes a phoney. .. If you’re interested in the common good and in promoting the wellbeing of others, it’s not always appropriate to match your behavior to your mood… Are courtesy and good manners inauthentic? Yes, sometimes, but are also the oil that lubricates our social machinery.”

A blameless life: “It sounds like a life with no risk, no edge, no real purpose beyond obedience to the dictates of the law and conscience …  Who among us can say we could never be blamed for anything? Never a cross or hurtful word?  Never a vengeful thought?  Never a selfish act? Never a failure to recognize and respond to someone’s need for help? Never a refusal to listen attentively and sympathetically to someone who’s taking too long to say something? No, ‘blameless’ sounds rather suspect to me.”

A passionate life: “Some people channel their passion into righting society’s wrongs, campaigning for peace and justice in responding to the needs of the poor, the sick, the disadvantaged or the marginalized. Some devote their passion in the raising of children, as parents, teachers or carers. Some pour their passion into charitable work in their local community. Some create beautiful works of art or performance that inspire, entertain, amuse or unsettle us. All are clearly tontributors to the common good. .. How they relate to those around them, especially to those who need their love and support, is, as always, the acid test of goodness.”

A creative life: “Lives that are passionate and productive are often associated with creativity … It is sometimes clearly intended to imply permission to live recklessly, behave badly or be outrageous, impatient, rude or arrogant, as though all will be forgiven in the name of Art. While it’s true that many painters, composers, writers, poets and creative people in fields other than the arts have acquired a reputation for treating people shabbily, others have  managed to maintain stable and loving relationships and to treat people with respect while still producing remarkable work.”

As we do the stations of the Cross, do penance and aspire for redemption during this Lenten season, may we also remember what the author, Hugh Mackay, says on p. 157 of his book, The Good Life :

“Once we focus on the idea of a good life as being a valuable life, a life that contributes to others’ wellbeing, worries about our personal level of contentment or our material prosperity will fade into the  background. The good life is not about being smart, rich, famous or sure of yourself. You don’t have to

be the life of the party to prove you’re having a good life. You don’t even have to be at the party.”

For comments, email npestelos@gmail.com.

NMP/12 March 2016/12.23 a.m.

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOD LIFE - Part 3

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

For this week’s column, we continue with our reflections on the Good Life, using as reference the book by Australian psychologist, Hugh Mackay, as part of our personal observance of the Lenten season. This is to complement those enduring lessons taught us through the Scriptures.

I find highly interesting and relevant his discussion on the other false leads towards a good life, aside from the pursuit of happiness, which I talked about in the previous column. Four of these false leads are as follows: yearning for certainty; an unhealthy curiosity about the future; too much preoccupation with the task of “finding yourself” and the meaning of life.

He says that while there is nothing inherently wrong with each of these pursuits, “but they can … easily distract us from the goals of the good life.” Each of these pursuits has “the potential to be an obsession, almost like an idol we worship, because each has an undeniable appeal.”

None of these pursuits however is about goodness. In pursuing them as an obsession, according to the author, we run the risk of diminishing ourselves as a person and our value to others.

For this week’s column, let me focus on just one of these “false leads” to the Good Life:

On yearning for certainty

Some of the interesting questions we ask ourselves are actually unknowable at this time. He lists some of them as follows:

-What will become of us, as a species?

-What happens when we die?

-How big is the universe, and how many other planets out there support species like ours?

-How can there be an edge of space?

-Before the Big Bang, there was … what? And what before that?

-Does it make more sense to believe in a god or not to believe in a god? And even it makes no sense, what do we lose by believing?

-Can all religions be right, or all wrong, or only one right, or is believing not about being right or wrong?

-Are religion and science incompatible or simply two different ways of looking at the world?

-Is one system of governing ourselves better than all others?

-Are the rise and fall of civilizations inevitable?

-Must so many people suffer?

-Will science one day have all the answers, sweeping aside the theories of theology, philosophy and psychology and even determining our moral code?

As human beings, we ask questions and seek certainty in our answers: “We want answers, and so, drawing on our intuition and imagination, we create our own belief systems, fed sometimes by experience and sometimes hope.”

Then we place our faith in the answers. We come to believe as true everything that we have put our faith in. We forget that even objective truths established by scientific methods are based on assumptions that are subject to uncertainty.

We tend to forget what Einstein said that the mysterious is the most beautiful experience that we can have in life. “It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead …”, says the author.

He adds: “Einstein was no religious believer, yet he was certainly prepared to marvel at life’s mysteries and look for answers to everything. He was interested in far more than the scientific, material and quantifiable world.”

Albert Einstein is best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc² , dubbed "the world's most famous equation", or his theory of relativity which underlies modern physics. But he is also known for saying this: “Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters.”

Faith becomes a necessity to lead the good life: “Faith is the work of the imagination; a creative act; a leap; a tentative, hopeful encounter with the numinous; a reaching-out for certainties that keep eluding us. Faith is also about trust, about deciding to settle for answers to questions we scarcely dare ask and whose answers we simply can’t know for sure.

“Faith is also about trust, about deciding to settle for answers to questions we scarcely dare ask and whose answers we simply can’t know for sure. Faith – at its best a noble, humble and often luminous quality in humans – can never be rooted in certainty. It evaporates under the pressure of rigid dogma, which is why there seems such a gulf between religion as expressed in the simple faith of a believer and religion as expressed in the panoply and power of an institution.” [Paragraphing ours.]

Then Mackay asserts:

“This is the great paradox of faith: we yearn to know but cannot know, so we construct or accept ready-made from an established institution, a set of beliefs to satisfy our need o make sense of what’s going on. If it’s not religious belief, it might be astrology, the free market, feng shui, superstition, science, a particular psychological or philosophical orientation – Buddhist, Freudian, Jungian, humanist –or a moral code we believe will make for a good life and, by extension, a better world.”

He drives home this point: “ But if we knew as objective facts the answers that faith supplies, there would be no need for faith. And if faith – that mystical , clouded, elusive yearning – is corrupted by the arrogance of certainty, it ceases to be faith and becomes mere elusion.

The fundamentalist is a person “who wants to transform faith into certainty.” He alone is correct, the others wrong. “Such arrogance relies on absolute certainty, which is why it is so infuriating to those who don’t happen to share that particular set of beliefs. It is also a caricature of faith.

Mackay explains:  “If you adopt a rigid word view – religious, anti-religious, political, economic, academic, aesthetic or otherwise – you tend to see everything through the filter of your convictions, and, not surprisingly, you see what you are looking for… It’s why they eschew the mystical; they don’t want to marvel as Einstein did or to rest with mysteries, they want to wrestle them into submission. It’s also why puzzled that their beliefs are not more widely accepted, they feel entitled to try to impose them on others- believers with different beliefs and non-believers alike.”

He notes fundamentalism is on the rise in all three of the Abrahamic traditions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Why so? “Fundamentalism (whether religious, political, economic or cultural) thrives at times of social upheaval and insecurity. When we are most perplexed and baffled by ambiguity, that’s when we are also most vulnerable to promises of black-and-white simplicity that offer us certainty.

“Given our current anxieties over global warming, international terrorism, the world’s growing refugee population and the threat of economic meltdown, it’s not hard to see the appeal in any set of beliefs that offers stable reference points in a shifting geopolitical landscape. A period marked by rapid and unpredictable change is therefore bound to be a breeding ground for fundamentalism. A deepening sense of uncertainty only whets our appetite for certainty, and the quest for certainty in any context comes to feel like a search for some version of the Holy Grail.”

In science, certainty is also slippery as in religion. Mackay says “certainty in science, like certainty in everything else that relies on assumptions, interpretations and theories, is more slippery than we might care to imagine. Scientific truths are, by their nature, always provisional.” He quoted the British philosopher Bertrand Russell who says science is “always tentative, expecting that modification in its present theories will sooner or later be found necessary and aware that or its method is one which is logically incapable of arriving at a complete and final demonstration.”

The author notes that “Einstein’s theory of relativity is being tested and challenged, and it may well turn out that, contrary to Einstein’s conviction, it is possible for particles to travel at speeds faster than the speed of light.”

Not too long ago, I read that some scientists are talking about us being able in the future to travel not only in space but also through time! They may have found sufficient basis to reconfigure Einstein’s formula!

He concludes: “Certainty is the enemy of reason and reasonableness. It fuels our complacency and arrogance, wrapping us in a cocoon of self-confidence, perhaps even self-righteousness.”

To lead the Good Life, we must take nothing for granted. We know the pursuit of certainty or black- and–white simplicity may distract us from facing life as it is “in all their chaos and unpredictability, their mingled joy and sorrow.”

Indeed to lead the Good Life is to be a realist.  For comments, email npestelos@gmail.com###

NMP/04 March 2016/9.06 a.m.