The Secretive Universe

My words came back to me like birds returning from winter migration; where a lone, immature crane went south, it came back wiser, accompanied by an entire flock.  Where I wrote "In the void created by the lack of information, we speculate about the truth," Sandy Knauer returned this to me: "I believe, as a society, we are bartering away that which should be most important to us.  We settle for secrecy because we don't want to expose ourselves."  She wrote the first essay, and this won't really make sense until you read what she said.

I had told her that I saw a growing trend in our country of people keeping secrets.  I had based that judgment on the news that our current president had created more classified information than any before him, even going so far as working back in time to make previously-public information unavailable.  It was also my perception that a huge underground river of information was flowing through every branch of the federal government, to be dammed, twisted and manipulated at every opportunity.  Sandy believes, as I do, that we are paying a price for this, but I have to question my formulation of this issue.  Are we really any more secretive now than we ever have been, or is that simply my perception?

Have human authorities ever really been open with those they oversee?  Has the Vatican ever told us all it knows about how the Bible was put together, and edited over time?  Do we fully know why the U.S. invaded Mexico in 1848, or what Roosevelt was doing to make the Japanese nervous before Pearl Harbor?  Did the 9/11 Commission tell us the whole story or was it edited to make it politically palatable?  As far as I can see, truth and governance have never been very good friends.  So why did I sense that we're getting worse about keeping secrets?

Sandy wrote about how she has rebelled against secret-keeping in her life, which made me wonder when I've done the same.  I first remembered secret-keeping that made me angry, such as when I realized my uncle was pumping me for information about what his employees thought, so he could figure out what he needed to hide from them.  It made me angry when professors tried to tell me my grades were fine so they didn't have to face the details about my complaints, and one particular professor who refused to tell me why she gave me a C in a poetry class created an axis around which my creative life turned for many years.

Then I took another piece of my life and gave it a different spin. There was a huge secret I had kept from myself for years, that my singing was awful.  After I realized this, I finally sought help, but it took me many more years to realize it was so because my voice was a secret to me, because I didn't listen to myself carefully.  How can you expect to sing on pitch if you don't listen very carefully?  How did I learn to ignore myself that way?  I grew up with a sense of living in a void, where I didn't have enough information because so much was hidden from me.  How far was fighting pulling my parents apart?  When would I have to intervene again someone to bring peace to the family?  I listened to everyone around me much more than to myself.

So I have some idea how I learned to be so secretive and scared to tell the truth, but I can't speak for the process others have endured except to speculate that it's not a positive, affirming process.    Here's where your truth as a reader may really kick in, but I'll speculate that it has something to do with growing up in a universe full of secrets.  There is so much beyond our comprehension that it's easy to include ourselves in that, or for women or men to throw up their hands and assert that the opposite sex is beyond understanding.  We may also, as a species, sense that much of what we take for the truth is disproved as cultural wisdom grows.  We slowly adopt new paradigms as truth, so maybe we're scared of speaking the truth because we sense that we're always on shaky ground. 

For hundreds of years, Newton and Descartes gave us a mechanistic universe  where something like "truth" was too vague to be meaningful, and the movement was perhaps capped with Einstein placing a limit on speed, as that of light and nothing beyond it.  He so disliked Quantum Physics and all its paradoxes that he attempted to make it look ridiculous, but his ridiculous vision of it has been proven over and over again in laboratories.  He didn't want to see a secret given up-that the universe was so mysterious that energy could be either a particle or a wave depending upon whether someone was looking at it.  Now he doesn't have to contend with the idea now coming  to the fore that there is a mysterious, still-immeasurable energy packed in the so-called empty spaces in an atom, a cubic centimeter of which exceeds the energy in all the solid matter found in the cosmos.  He doesn't have to grapple with the idea that electrons apparently jump from one shell to another instantaneously, not caring the least about the speed of light.  Nor does he have to follow physicists into the realm of consciousness, which may turn out to be a fundamental force in the universe.

As the word "change" is placed on a flag to be flown at political rallies, I think it's helpful to remember that we human beings are resistant to change at a very deep level, so much so that I wonder sometimes if we'd just as soon everybody go on keeping secrets so we don't have to deal with all that knowledge.  We are skeptics at heart who are usually comfortable with the status quo, no matter how it imprisons us.  It may be the nature of the universe which has trained us to be such skeptics, to hold on to our personal version of reality and call it "truth."  If you are truly interested in change, do you really think it will come as long as we live inside a secret-keeping paradigm?

So, returning to Sandy's idea that secret-keeping damages our society, it seems that we get awfully hung up on truth rather than talking about why we don't or can't say what's on our minds.  Whether or not you agree that information was meant to flow in this universe, you may be able to agree that secret-keeping does keep information from moving.  I would submit that Sandy's article "I Have a Secret" illustrates the power of getting information moving.  If you read through the comment thread you will see how disparate opinions move together and find common ground, how words are softened and new perspectives are born in a remarkably energizing process.

 It is my argument that there is neither patriotism nor statesmanship in refusing to talk to other governments in the world or in keeping secrets from them, because the honest movement of information is powerful, and peace-making.  The same is true, in my opinion, for keeping secrets from the citizens you were elected to govern.  It creates a void which we will fill with negative information, because we innately distrust those who withhold information from us.  We know that even though truth is tenuous, it is always more powerful when it arrives as a flock of birds rather than a solitary flyer.