Just recently, somewhere amid TV images of the bloody struggles in the streets of Cairo, almost unnoticed at the end of the news, there was a small announcement that astronomers had confirmed the discovery of six new planets. They are known as ‘exoplanets’ because they orbit stars other than our own sun. Twenty years ago the idea of planets outside our own solar system was mere speculation – today 1235 have been found, 63 of them exist in a so-called ‘goldilocks zone’, that neither fries or freezes them by being neither too close or too far from their parent sun, a habitable zone where liquid water and therefore life could exist. Since there are from 2 to 400 billion stars in our local Milky Way alone, the probability of finding earthlike planets in the near future is, I am told, as good as certain.
All this is mind-blowing enough, but what do you suppose the psychological effect on humanity will be if extraterrestrial life is discovered. The impact will be far greater than Darwin’s discovery of evolution; maybe even greater than was the impact of Greek philosophy and science on Medievalism. Should we find only extraterrestrial bacteria it will doubt go right over the heads of the majority; and many will simply go into denial. But the long term effect will be another step in the process of humanity’s growth out of childhood, out of being, how shall I say, embedded in the local.
The Medieval Mind saw the universe as centred on ourselves, where even the animal kingdom was there to provide moral lessons on the Christian life. It was OK for everyone at the time; and we still give a respectful nod to such archaic beliefs; and even now we might say that if a Muslim woman is happy and prefers wearing a full burka with only the tiniest holes to see through and believes that women should be stoned to death for adultery, who are we to quarrel with her? To be thus thoroughly embedded in a local backwater is nothing unusual. It’s part of growing up.
When I was a child the universe was number 31 Crownfield Rd, London E15, one of the poorest parts of the East End. I emerged into life embedded in this particular cultural and family locality. There was nothing else. As I grew up there were other places with differing styles of life. I could begin compare, evaluate, imagine. But being embedded in a ‘local’ is a state I can still fall into when some event fills my horizon and I am suddenly confined – a friend has cancer; an earthquake; or, by chance, I am thrown into a narrow mood. Suddenly, my horizon becomes restricted. I am encapsulated within an experience. The is no outside.
Nobody grows up all of a piece. We all start off fairly localised as a child, a pretty much ‘together’ creature; but different aspects of the personality grow at a different rates. Some pieces are very slow moving; some pieces hardly move at all. Some pieces get left behind and are so attached to the earliest years it is as though no time had passed at all. I give as an example my moods and attitudes to close relationships. In this aspect, I have always been a ‘slow developer’, as they say. I offer no excuse since most people drag their feet here to some extent – at least, everyone I have ever known. ‘Relationships’ are a department of life that is the most difficult in the world – apart from floods, typhoons and earthquakes.
Though you would think, wouldn’t you, that becoming acquainted with worlds beyond my local origins, learning about foreign cultures, history, evolution and exoplanets, as well as all my life experience, would devalue the local? If not devalue it, at least make it less riveting, relativising its importance. Well, in a way it does; and yet, paradoxically, the wider view helps us see the local for the first time. Just as, when earth is viewed from the moon, we see it and cherish it with new eyes.
This is well demonstrated in practical psychological work. Therapy deals with areas in a person’s life where they are cornered in some local concern, past or present, some precise situation that offers no shift of horizon, no possibility of imagining otherwise. Sometimes a person is so embedded, so implicated in some such compressed, home-like zone, so localized, that they are completely in it – so, of course, they cannot see it. Then there are no qualifications or questions; and they are so accustomed to it that, no matter how deadening the style, they do not see it as a problem – there is no problem. Such people don’t come to therapy – any more than a hot Muslim or a evangelical Christian would.
To free oneself from an entrenchment one has to see that it is and how it is. Not try to change it, that only makes it persist – but to see it. Just distant enough, yet close enough to the isssue – in the goldilocks zone you might say – to be able to distinguish it and turn towards it. There’s no need to work on it – that’s all it needs.
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