But doesn’t the preceding thought lead straight to centrism? Isn’t the center the realm of pragmatic compromise, of detailed understanding of the actual workings of government and economy, of dealing with the world as it is? And isn’t this whole trail of crumbs precisely radical, theoretical, idealistic?
I would like to get out of this easily, by saying that the center is controlled by special interests and bad philosophy, a degraded and reductive materialism, that it does not serve anyone’s interests except for those of the economic ruling class. All this is true, but it does not quite resolve the contradiction, because, for one thing, actual practical governance always does involve power, moral compromise, interested parties. It is, by definition, not ideal—and this is precisely its virtue.
In fact I think I am face-to-face here with a very deep problem. The situation we are actually in is bad. Incremental change is no change at all. Things keep getting worse, and all the best efforts of activists and nonprofits hardly slow it down, much less turn it back—half the time they seem to be contributing to the problem. Everyone knows it’s getting worse, left and right, liberal and conservative, but their stories about how and why grow ever more one-sided, divisive, hysterical, hateful. Meanwhile, those who present themselves as, and in some sense are, dealers in practical realities, in the compromises and needs of the real everyday world, are the ones who are leading us (confidently, proudly) further and further, faster and faster, into disaster. So we want to live differently, yes really differently—but this must mean to imagine a new mode of life, to reject reality in favor of theory, fantasy, abstraction. And we know how dangerous and flimsy that is.
So how can we marry these insights? How can we radically reject a great mess of corrupted, confused ideas, destructive habits, etc. and at the same time meticulously salvage and conserve so much that is necessary and valuable, that has the solidity, detail, and texture that can come only from long usage over generations? To ask the question in a different way: how are we to make sense of our horror of our past and our love for it?
(I have a friend who believes that nostalgia is a disease of our generation, a neurosis instilled in us by our culture. But I think nostalgia is our way of registering everything that has been and is being lost. That loss is so great we can’t really face it and take it only in little diluted doses, as a particular nostalgia for this or that time. Once, driving back from a wedding in Vermont, we passed a highway with a sign for Boston, and I suddenly thought how it might have been two hundred years ago, passing an unmarked highway winding off through woods and fields, not knowing for certain where it led, and having days to travel to reach Boston, and I thought how big and unknown the world was then, even the little corner of it in which one lived, and how good it would have been to live in a world that big, how humbling, how invigorating, and deep down how comforting. What is misleading in our nostalgia is only the narrowness of its scope.)
4 comments:
this is so true it is painful and google just bumped me off because it doesn't recognize me. so what are we to do? how are we to live like the wilderness, the whole unknown world is still there on an unmarked road?
You're responding to my parenthesis. I hadn't planned to write about that, but I have of course thought about it, and my thoughts go like this:
It is not only our land, our geography that has become crushingly mapped out and known-- it is, or seems to be, everything: the workings of the microscopic world, of living organisms, of the human mind, of economies, cultures, societies. My anecdote about the marked highway serves as a kind of metaphor for all these other kinds of stultifying knowledge.
The first step to a kind of freedom is to recognize that much of this knowledge is sheer bunk and the rest is far less definitive than it appears. We still know very little about how the physical world is put together, even less about how our bodies work, and as for minds and cultures, we know hardly anything about them. We know less than people of past eras who at least knew that it was through stories and particulars that one seeks knowledge of the mind, not through statistical studies and generalities. And to know this is to know that the question is infinite, that no accumulation of knowledge will ever put it to rest.
Many of my students are curious about psychology, and I know why: they want to know the workings of the human mind-- what could be more interesting? Last year they formed a psychology club to study the subject, but some of them were disappointed: it was all just statistical studies about reaction times or selection bias under controlled conditions. I tell them: if you want to know about the human mind, read a novel!
What we do is stop thinking that the big questions have been answered, that psychologists and neuroscientists and economists know more than a tiny fragment of what they mean to be studying (the latter know hardly anything at all that isn't nonsense). What we do is bring the problems of how to live and what we are, of death and meaning and metaphysics, of god, purpose, right and wrong-- to bring them back into our own hands, which is the only place they belong. They are not answered, they are not obviated, they are as pressing and as deep as ever.
This is not a comforting fantasy, or some appeal to "subjectivity" over "objectivity." There is no such thing as objectivity. Objectivity is the fantasy, a new god we made for ourselves. What we call "subjectivity" is simply reality. This pile of knowledge is a tower of Babel. It's already crumbling. All over the academy, there is a crisis of validity. The humanities are a mob running after the latest trends; the social sciences fell prey to a deranged methodology that leaves them able to definitively answer any question as long as the question is so narrow no one could care about it, and even then their results keep getting overturned; even in the hard sciences they're suddenly realizing that no one has replicated most of the major "findings."
your students are so incredibly lucky! thanks for these thoughts...pretty darn amazing. you and your mind, that is.
Aw shucks. Really-- thanks for all this encouragement, Stephanie.
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