Visions, more precisely (17)

I wrote that a vision “is a way of formulating desires and questions, of putting our longings in clearer and more concrete terms.” It strikes me that I can be more precise:

 

A vision is a way of interrogating our longings, of seeing whether we understand what we are longing for, whether what we are having is really a desire for something in particular and not, perhaps, a sort of itch or a mental tic or a nameless unhappiness that has not found its proper expression—of seeing, in fact, whether we really do desire it and are not deceiving ourselves and longing for something we do not want.

 

This is a real concern when we're talking about community, because of course there are things about traditional communities that I think we want to leave behind (their narrow-mindedness, their enforced conformity), and it's an open question whether any sort of close, stable community is possible without these things. Or rather, it's not clear what relationship there is between the longing for community and the longing for conformity. Isn’t this longing that I have felt all my adult life in fact (in part at least) a longing to live around people whose beliefs I agree with and whose conduct I affirm? And don’t I long for that because I am surrounded, or imagine I’m surrounded, by people whose beliefs and behaviors I deeply disagree with? And isn’t that cosmopolitanism? Or multiculturalism? Or is it? This moral outrage at and paranoid mistrust of our fellow citizens? And yet I’m well aware that certain projects to turn back from modernity have opted instead for an enforced conformity of nightmare proportions.

 

So what are we to do with differences of opinion, belief, conduct? Why have they devolved into acrimony, and how ought we to navigate them, and how far should they go? Aren’t there in fact some basic agreements that would be necessary to live better together—and can these agreements, in the face of all that has gone wrong, really be confined to conduct alone? And, if there are in fact necessary agreements, then how would those agreements come about and how would they continue, or if they stopped what would that mean, what would we do? And in what setting, on what scale, could any of this begin to make sense?

 

I am talking about visions in order to force us to ask these kinds of questions, even to insist that we try to answer them. 

 

But my point is not to "turn from problems to solutions” but to suggest a different way of formulating and organizing problems. When we say that something is “wrong” with the world, this seems to mean that we have in mind some other conditions under which this thing would be “right.” But often we don’t, and in that case I think it must not really be clear what exactly is wrong, what we even mean by "wrong." To think about, even just to dream about, solutions is not to turn away from problems but finally to take them seriously.