I’m on a quest for the Good. As I think back on the past two years of the health crisis, I wonder if some good things have come out of it.
For me, it’s been a spiritual reset. By stepping away from society, I’ve been resetting who I am and how I think. I’m by no means perfect. I won’t pretend to be a saint. However, the contemporary philosopher, C Thi Nguyen, thinks that a reset is necessary to get ourselves out of echo chambers. You can find his article here:
https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult
I don’t think I’m in an echo chamber or a cult, far from it, but I feel like, to some extent, everything in society can be like that. It’s easy to get caught up in the assumptions everyone around us has about what it means to be good. We think we know. The truth is, none of us do… not for sure, anyway. We all have ideas, but nobody really knows. If we did, we wouldn’t have all these religions and philosophies wrangling all the time, because everyone would know what’s right.
As I continue my quest toward the Good, I wonder if, to some extent, the first step is to “unlearn what you’ve learned”, as Yoda from Star Wars would say. Nguyen suggests that starting from scratch with, say, the practices in Rene Descartes‘s Meditations might be good. The idea is simply to doubt everything and then slowly discover what you really think is true. We don’t end with doubt. That’s just the starting point. Hopefully, we arrive at a clearer conception of reality.
I feel like the problem with getting at the Good is the plethora of approaches we are offered: different religions, different philosophies, online pundits, social media flame wars, and just the prevailing opinions of our local communities. Are we right enough with the Lord? Are we woke enough with our peers? It can often seem like a maelstrom.
By allowing the health crisis to reset me, I’m beginning to zero in on what I really think is right. Does that make me a better person? Maybe not, but I do think it’s a necessary first step in becoming one.