Can we believe in objective ideals - Essay Example

The Idols of the Tribe are supposed to connect one person to every other individual in the world by making a man think that everyone is inherently similar to everyone else in the universe (Bacon, 1620). While this may be true for a large portion of the time as in every person who is alive needs to breath and that every person who gets hungry needs to find food, the similarities often end quite quickly to be replaced with differences that have to be reconciled. Granted that no man is an island and certain social contracts need to be accepted by everyone if civilization is to exist but there is also a need to recognize the diversity which makes the tribe of man divide itself into the tribes of men.

Even within tribes, there exist groups, religions, families and even individual differences which further serve to erode the concept of the tribe and decrease the idea of unity amongst individuals. This in turn reduces both the need and the validity of the existence of ideals in nature. In fact, Bacon laments the fact that a man’s sense is falsely confirmed by the standard of things as per his observations (Bacon, 1620). Unfortunately it must be realized that whatever we see around us may be very familiar and comforting to us in the hope that this is how life is supposed to be and this how people around us are supposed to act.

For example, a person who has never experienced life outside a suburban American environment could be lulled into thinking at everyone looks and acts like them. Clearly this is a false situation and a wrongly understood objective idol. The majority of the world is not America, the majority of the world is not white, the majority does not live in suburbia and most importantly, the majority of the world is out of the tribe. This is true for people outside the tribe too, for instance a person living in a village in India could think that whatever they see around themselves is the absolute truth of how human beings should be molded and they