The Death and Rediscovery of Reality
Is Realty enclosed within our minds? Or, is reality that which exists between our thoughts, our selves, our relationships, and the experience of time and space?
Is Perception Reality?
When talking about reality, I often hear people say, “Well, perception is reality.” But is it? What do they mean? Are they unconsciously saying that “My perception is reality?” and yours is not?” How can 8 billion people’s own perceptions be reality? Is this a reason why there is so much conflict in the world? Because everyone unwittingly believes that they are the ultimate judge of what is real and true?
Of course, confront them with that perception of their perception, and most people will back away and say that is not what they mean. Instead, what they really mean is that we as people have the capacity to access reality and understand it in some limited, yet meaningful way
Your perception is reality. But not the totality of reality.
Now, let’s flip the emphasis.
What happens when we structure society to avoid reality? We create a world where no one is accountable. We live in a virtual simulation of hyperreality. We find that values, traditions, institutions, and our relationships are tossed aside as obstacles to our freedom to be who we choose to be.
What happens when there is no longer any consequences for our ideas and actions? In effect, we have successfully avoided reality. I can do anything that I want without fear of contradiction or retribution.
What happens when we lose reality, and the capacity to be surprised by beauty and love? We never discover the joy in accomplishing a great goal. We not able to marvel at a beautiful work of art. We lose the capacity to be curious about the world beyond our experience.
When we lose touch with reality, we ultimately lose touch with ourselves.
The Death of Reality
Most people that I know are not interested in postmodern beliefs about reality. They don’t believe that perception is reality and nothing more. They don’t believe that reality is unknowable. They live their lives in touch with reality at the most practical level. They experience reality as that what takes place in time and space.
You may not be interested in postmodernists thinking about reality, but they are interested in you. Ten years ago, I wrote The Spectacle of the Real. I saw that it was becoming harder to find reality in public life. A hyperreality is constantly assaulting our minds and senses. Our experience of life has become like a series of hyper-emotional one-act reality television shows, binged every 15 seconds for hours at a time.
Is the video or the show real? Or is it a hyper-perception of life presented for our entertainment? Postmodern media seduces us to have an attitude of mind where we say either, “I’m glad I’m not like them!” or “I wish I was like them.” We are not to contemplate who we really are. Rather, we are to define ourselves by who we are not. As a result, judgment becomes our approach to reality. As a result, we lose touch with reality and a clear sense of who we are.
Jean Baudrillard wrote extensively about reality. He described the death of reality. He called it The Perfect Crime and the Murder of the Real. He writes,
“Murder of the Real: it sounds like Nietzsche proclaiming the death of God. But this murder of God was a symbolic one, and it was going to change our destiny. We are still living, metaphysically living off this original crime, as survivors of God. But the Perfect Crime no longer involves God, but Reality, and it is not a symbolic murder but an extermination. …
Extermination means that nothing is left, no trace, not even a corpse. The corps(e) of the Real - if there is an - has not been recovered, is nowhere to be found. And this is because the Real is not just dead (as God is), it has purely and simply disappeared. In our virtual world, the question of the Real, of the referent, of the subject and its object, can no longer be posed. …
What could be said about this blind point of reversal, where nothing is either true or false any longer and everything is drifting indifferently between cause and effect, between origin and finality? Is it reversible or irreversible? Can we return to the point where the line of history was broken and we were projected to the other side of the mirror? Can we survive the Metastases of the Real as we survived the Death of God? Are we dedicated to survival, or to revival? I would like to give an answer, but promises of the future go the same way as memories of the past: they vanish with the very principle of reality.
For reality is but a concept, or a principle, and by reality I mean the whole system of values connected with this principle. The Real as such implies an origin, an end, a past and a future, a chain of causes and effects, a continuity and a rationality. No real without these elements, without an objective configuration of discourse. And its disappearing is the dislocation of this whole constellation.”
If it is true that reality died, how did this come about?
How has reality, as the context of life, become transformed into a commodity and a weapon against values, traditions, and the institutions of society?
If you read more of Baudrillard’s perspective, you realize that he isn’t saying reality no longer exists. He is saying that our perception of reality has become something artificial or hyperreal. We have lost touch with the concreteness of the real. Instead, we are presented with a simulated version of the real.
An example of this transformation of reality into hyperreality is how we view death. We understand that at the point of the death of a loved one, we are facing reality. My sisters and I stood at our father’s side as he breathed his last breath. We knew he was gone. My mother’s death came suddenly while on vacation. I had not seen her in two weeks. The phone call in the middle of the night from my father haunts me to this day. It is symbolic of unhappy news. This is a spiritual reality. This is the existence of the real intruding into our perception of the world. It is why I have no interest in films where death is treated as entertainment. It is why I have no interest in the game of Russian/Ukrainian genocide. It is not a game. Death is too real to me to be entertained by it as some hyperreality.
Culturally, we don’t see death as real. Zombie television series and horror films provide us with moments of fearful excitement. Action films allow us to laugh in the face of death because the hero never dies. We know that this isn’t real. As a result, we accept the hyperreality of death as not being real. In death, reality is always present to us.
Reality breaks into our consciousness when we encounter people who are suffering. During my book tour in 2019, I heard many stories about tragic occurrences that forever altered a person’s life. The most painful example was the woman who told me of her husband leaving to go to work and never coming home. No note. No phonecall. No letter. No paycheck coming in. Four months later, she found him living 800 miles away with a woman who he had met online. In a world where reality no longer exists, you can break up your marriage by just walking out the door. This is a Zombie existence.
As a result, the death of reality is really the loss of a meaningful relationship to reality. When this happens, we lose a way for us to know ourselves in a more objective, realistic way.
Rediscovering Reality
The idea that I am nurturing in this series of essays that I am calling The Order of Reality, I hope will provoke creativity and imagination focused on how we can rediscover reality.
The three contexts or orders of my framework are Spiritual, Intellectual, and Cultural. We experience reality in ways that are Relational, Conceptual, and Touchable. Each order of reality exists within itself and between each of the other orders.
In our very binary, divisive world, there will be those who will see the need to defend one order as dominant over and against the other two. One order to rule them all. It is the moral authoritarian way. It happens because there is no reality beyond my moral righteousness. No reality that I am personally accountable to.
When I began to think about this thought experiment, The Spectacle of the Real was on my mind. More specifically, I was pondering how our political culture had come to dominate our thought culture. When a person’s thoughts are denied the freedom to be expressed, it is not because some logical case has been made. Rather it is because the power inherent in politics forces the closure of diverse expressions of ideas.
The late Andrew Breitbart said that “politics is downstream from culture.” When I first heard that claim, I wondered what culture was downstream from. It made sense to me then that philosophy or intellectual thought is upstream from culture. In other words, the systematic formulation of ideas into ideologies becomes the ground for culture.
At this point, I began to ask the question about reality. My assumption is that reality has a separate existence from ideology and culture. It is existence. We experience it, try to understand it, and ultimately, learn to live with it. Is reality’s independence from absolute human control the problem that is solved by declaring that it is dead or only a perception of an individual’s mind?
What, then, is upstream from philosophical or intellectual thought, whether it results in a social or political ideology or not? When I want to think clearly, I return to listen to lectures on mathematics and logic. I’m not a mathematician or a logician. I just know that the people in those fields seek to think logically and clearly, even if we average people cannot understand the sequence of steps that they make.
Within that broad field, the ideas of Kurt Godel have interested me the most. Godel is known for the two incompleteness theorems. Basically, there is the possibility that something that can be shown to be true mathematically cannot necessarily be proven to be true. The initial criticism of his theories was that this injected limitations into what mathematics could prove. However, over the almost century since he presented his thought in public, the field of math has continued to move forward, seeking to answer questions that are essentially about reality.
I take from the Godel story that the limitations are human ones. Since Rene Descartes formulated “I think, therefore, I am,” we have been working in a self-imposed tug-of-war from reality. In other words, “Reality is what I say it is. If I say God is dead, then God is dead. If I say reality is a social construct, reality is a social construct.” Then some miraculous occurrence happens that does not fit within our preconceived notions of reality, and we further exclude ourselves from the possibilities inherent in an embrace of reality beyond our present understanding. Our limitations are natural and self-imposed. Reality is more than the natural physical order. It is the entire ethos of existence.
If there is something more than the physical realm, let us call it consciousness. But, even that word, with its long history of interpretation by scientists, psychologists, theologians, and Eastern mystics, seems to be an expression of something greater. While it would be easy to just call that God, that term also seems to be a kind of limitation, a reduction to a personality operating within a specific context.
This is why I call the third and highest order the Spiritual. It is the order where Reality and Consciousness exist. As a result, when we practice our disciplines of thought and culture-creating, we are doing so in the context of something much larger, more expansive.
Are we accountable to this grand expanse of the Spiritual? That may be the question that we humans have sought to avoid since the beginning of time. It is also the direction that we can point to as where our hope for the future can be found and realized.