How to capture the present moment? The drift, the disconnect, the gap… The pandemic rolls on, in some places life coming back to normal in stops and starts, elsewhere no end in sight, collectively what appears like limbo is, on closer inspection, movement is occurring, just perhaps not where and how we want. At some point, a normality of sorts will return, much of the old, a bit of the now, some new too, stuck together unevenly. And yet… perhaps a bit too much has been revealed through all of this, might it be that what comes after might not be enough? The threads unravel, the glue comes unstuck, the pieces fall apart… Is this what awaits?
Nancy Fraser speaks of, ‘a general crisis whose effects metastasize everywhere, shaking confidence in established worldviews’. One does not need to be a scholar of Fraser’s stature to reach such a judgment, however, things are not working as they should be, that feeling is palpable, it is there for anyone to see, should they choose to look. And yet, many do not. Fraser’s framing is justifiable but excessive: for some, the crisis might be evident and felt, for many more, though, crisis is not how life is felt and understood. If only it were that dramatic… Rather it is the slow and steady drip; the dull and constant thud. It is there, it is happening, visible but baked into daily life. So many things that are wrong, these things should not be, but are, they are there.
But to look? Goethe determined, ‘it is hard to come to terms with the errors of the times’. And yet the errors continue to mount and grow, they become increasingly difficult to pass and sidestep. At some point, though, thoughtlessness takes effort, it actually takes more work than thinking. And so instead, we are left with the growth of a certain type of studied, cultivated stupidity. A bonsai tree of idiocy. Effort yes, but still easier than the alternative, of actually reckoning with the errors pilling up, the crises looping on themselves. Here another reflection from Goethe applies: ‘people who think deeply and seriously are on bad terms with the public.’ And with themselves, it might be added. Easier not to think, go with the flow, eat the slop that is served.
The times we find ourselves in, broken and disjointed, are not without consequence. They influence our capacity to think, to act, to be. And yet the air is stale, it is musty, it hangs heavily. Writing in 1933 Walter Benjamin observed, ‘We have become impoverished. We have given up one portion of the human heritage after another, and have often left it at the pawnbroker’s for a hundredth of its true value, in exchange for the small change of “the contemporary”.’ Left with the contemporary, the present moment, while realizing it is not enough. A very certain type of incomplete limbo. A crisis that does not even have the courtesy to be sufficiently dramatic to galvanise thought. Instead, more drift and thoughtlessness.