Listening to a major podcast on one of the most important questions of our time, I was struck by a judgement made by the guest, who spoke of policy being used to encourage people to make ‘right choices’. The specific issue and platform are less important than the more general mentality it encapsulated.
Writing in the 1990s, Gillian Rose observed, ‘in both the world of politics and in the intellectual world, there seems to be a low tolerance of equivocation’. This tendency has only hardened in the intervening decades. It is quite remarkable how little this has changed in recent years, despite experience outstripping expectation, reality mocking models. Whether plague or war, the dominant response is to grasp for explanations that promise comprehension and control at a time when so much remains unclear.
The late Roberto Calasso captured something of the conditions we find ourselves in:
For we who are living at this moment, the most exact and most acute sensation is one of not knowing where we are treading from day to day. The ground is brittle, lines blur, materials fray, prospects waver. Then we realize more clearly than before that we are living in the “unnamable present.”
Much like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the difficulty is recognising and comprehending the whole. In different ways, the frames of polycrisis and metamorphosis try to name the unnamable, or at least, more clearly demarcate certain processes and forces shaping the present moment. In these notes, I am consciously circling around these themes, for if we are dealing with non-linear phenomena, why should we expect neat, linear explanations?
One of the challenges is to bypass the comforting oasis offered by a logic of ‘right choices’, and to consciously linger on the ambiguities and difficulties of the present moment. As Rose determined, ‘wisdom works with equivocation.’ The resulting stance is more tentative and insecure, as this exchange between Martha Nussbaum and Bill Moyers reveals:
Nussbaum: But you know, sometimes just to see the complexity that’s there, and see it honestly, without flinching, and without re-describing it in the terms of some excessively simple theory, that is itself a progress.
Moyers: As Gabriel says in Green Pastures, “Everything that’s tied down is coming loose.” Goodness, the good life, the life one attempts to lead by one’s moral bearings is always going to be a fragile thing, is it not?
Nussbaum: I think so. As long as it’s understood well and richly, it will be a fragile thing.
Conceiving of goodness as fragile does not deny its value, but it does caution against excessive confidence in one’s virtue and veracity. This approach is echoed by Tzvetan Todorov, who observed: ‘pride is not a wise counselor. People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world.’ Instead, Todorov advocated for a modest and moderate form of humanism, by which ‘we do not give up the search for truth, but we do give up imposing on others, by means of force, what we believe to be the truth.’
Staying with complexity, embracing equivocation, and recognising the fragility of goodness: such thinking might be more fitting for the amorphous conditions we find ourselves in.