I’ve been saying for some time Mother Teresa–who believed in private charity and presumably had orthodox Catholic views on abortion–would have been dragged through the mud if she had had the nerve to run as a Republican. Why not up the ante?
And of course the logical path of confusion is false certainty. That is how you break that spell. Most human misery comes from an inability to tolerate confusion, which is to say, to neither say there is no truth, nor to say that many differing accounts cannot simultaneously have some, if not final, validity.
We could say that valid critiques of what might be termed the Western Project can be made of the notion of One Universal Truth. At the same time, No Universal Truth, as a final answer, is even worse. Much worse.
Time and place matter. Concrete tasks require concrete ideas. But most of us are operating from a sort of spasm most of the time.
It is odd to contemplate, but animals have vastly less capacity for suffering. I say this because I am finding I cannot adopt vegetarianism. I don’t know why. It doesn’t feel right in my heart, for me, right now.
But think about it: if you lock an animal in a cage it clearly suffers. It grunts and groans and wants out. But it lacks the abstract ability to lament its situation abstractly. And it lacks the ability to fear things which have not happened yet.
Humans, on the other hand, can suffer slings and arrows of their own making continually. They can develop mental habits which make them sick with fear and worry. They can live lifetimes filled with emotional suffering, without anything bad actually happening to them at all. This opioid epidemic is happening in the middle of the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen.