29. When Frames Collide (1)

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One of the most powerful testimonies to the Oneness of GOD, and to the pain awaiting whoever ignores it, is found within the psyche of each one of us. No rational and mature (‘aqil baligh) person can sustain for more than a short time and in matters of minor significance the astonishing discomfort of cognitive dissonance. “In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, or participates in an action that goes against one of these three, and experiences psychological stress because of that. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent.”¹

The consistency we require is not just the physical unity of the individual that all organisms have. Cognitive dissonance affects us primarily where it matters, in our mental life. To ‘make up one’s mind’ is to resolve an issue one way (or another). Even when we participate in an action or involve ourselves in some larger entity, we feel constrained to assimilate the meaning of that act or involvement within our own particular frame of unified meaning. And since we are involved in the whole universe, with all the vastness of significance that entails, our framing might ultimately aim to condense into an internally consistent set of meanings all that our mind surveys. It is this incessant urge to consistency on a cosmic scale that informs humanity’s penchant for religion (or its modern surrogates, such as science). If we cannot achieve a ‘theory of everything’, we need at least one narrative that is comprehensive enough to include ourselves and our chosen absolutes and give us enough reason to go on living, as Viktor Frankl has so convincingly shown in Man’s Search for Meaning.

Every one of us must accept a certain irredeemable level of inconsistency in his or her life, and the same may be said of religion, which deals with our contradictions in down-to-earth fashion. Like a government or a parent, religion has to convey a wide variety of messages, from the ineffability of Divine Unity to boundless love for mankind to the strictures and penalties required for discipline in a dojo, on a pilgrimage, or during a fast. Overall consistency is paramount, but diversity cannot be denied, which is why the wording in this verse ends with a qualifier – a great amount:

In other words, the Qur’an can tie together in one vast and all-inclusive structure the great and the small in our affairs, ranging from the incomprehensible greatness of GOD to the creation of the cosmos to the percentages for each party in an inheritance, but it cannot eliminate the obvious disparities between, for example, faith and idolatry or virtue and vice and how differently we are to regard them, or general laws and particular exceptions, or the contradictions in advice that stem from the variety of human characters and circumstances, or the various inconsistencies of denotation and connotation inherent in all languages. These are the lesser incompatibilities that no system can resolve except by appealing to some principle of natural contrast, such as yin and yang or the universal symbolisms of day and night, heaven and earth, and the like. A great amount of incongruity, on the other hand, is lurking in the shadows of systems that shrink their domains to maintain a narrowly logical consistency or sharpness in their focus, and thereby shut their eyes to realities that do not fit.

Many spiritual ideologies, for example, preach a pacifism they can ‘afford’ because they offload their defence to other less spiritual systems built to deal with ideologies that do not renounce war. An ascetic or scholarly elite – friars, dervishes, monks, and the like – can be held up as the ideal in spiritual heroism because they live off the alms and hard mundane labour of the supposedly lower classes or the estates that the powerful and wealthy commandeered from the working poor. Scientism can claim to be rigorous in its chosen fields of investigation because it has so little comfort and motivation to offer ordinary people beset by their messy emotional and spiritual needs. The economist will have nothing to say about artistic inspiration, and neither will the poet dare to prescribe fiscal policy for a nation. Each advocates a small part that aims or claims to fill a whole.

In this sense, we could say that constricted or incomplete systems allow for a great amount of incongruity by simply ignoring what they cannot include.

I observed earlier that GOD is our name for what should be considered the ultimate or greatest frame of all. Faith in GOD, therefore, should be mankind’s highest act of framing and, therefore, be characterized by greater expansiveness, comprehensiveness, and resilience than any lesser framing. It should be comfortable with research into the world that GOD is constantly creating, even as it questions the less scientific preconceptions that often inform such research. And it should not be afraid to confront contrary points of view with arguments and appeals to evidence similar to those found in the Qur’an itself. As I pointed out in Chapter 21, however, the sad fact of the matter is that no matter what frame is employed, its adherents will shrink it to wrap around themselves like a blanket to pander to their individual fears and interests instead of seeking to enlarge their minds and spirits and explore the new horizons that a truly great frame can open up for them.

¹ From the entry in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

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