More Radical Hope

“I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with ‘right track’ and ‘wrong track’ but missing the number of people who think the answer to ‘How are things going in America?’ is ‘Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.’”
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2005

“We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today—from all points on the political spectrum. It is as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it.”
Jonathan Lear, Chapter 1 of Radical Hope

Some of us may be relieved by the results of med-term elections in the US, but only mildly relieved. The sense of vulnerability is still with us, and will probably last the rest of our lives, as we face a world in which almost none of our ideas about how to live remain relevant.

This is the kind of world in which Native Americans found themselves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only their traditions, but very deep underlying assumptions about good and evil were challenged, often overthrown, by radically altered circumstances.

In Radical Hope, Lear illustrates the cultural genius with which one tribe, the Crow nation, approached an unknowable but inescapable future. Chief among their resources was the belief that there is a higher order of reality from which guidance may be obtained. Through dreams, the Crow received instructions that helped them to transcend or, more accurately, transmute their traditional stories, evolving narratives more useful in an unrecognizably altered reality.

Analysis, reason, common sense, organization, radical action: these alone will not prepare us for our possible futures. Only the alchemy of imagination—envisioning in new ways—will ultimately suffice.

Radical Hope: thin and thick concepts

Without explaining in detail, Lear uses the language of “thin” and “thick” concepts in his discussion of deep cultural values. I’ve found this an interesting tangent.

The great 20th-century philosopher Bernard Williams… argued that there was a deep distinction to be made between what he called "thick" and "thin" concepts of proper behavior in the world.

A thin concept, like "good," could be understood in terms of abstract propositions, but a thick concept, like "courage," was so complexly interwoven into the kind of traditional society likely to recognize it that it became, in Williams's terms, a "piece of knowledge" for that society, a form of understanding, too deep, as Wordsworth said, for tears, that made that society work. But that kind of knowledge, Williams suggested, does not travel well. It cannot easily be lifted from one world and inserted into another. The motives underlying much of the action of Homer's Iliad are not, for instance, easily understood by anyone today.”
---John Clute scifi.com

This language, it seems to me, amplifies Donald E. Brown’s list of Human Universals. That is, virtually all human cultures feature prohibition of incest, for example, but what constitutes incest varies from culture to culture. The universal taboo is a “thin” concept; a “thick” and non-transferable concept of incest might be a deep prohibition against relations between first cousins.

Reviews of Radical Hope:
The Globe and Mail
A.M. New York

Midlife romance

It’s a complicated, er, proposition.

[I]

When you’re young, you tend to move in crowds of the equally young and eligible, at school, nightclubs, sporting events, church youth groups, malls. Nature and society both conspire to find you a partner. You may have to beat volunteers off with a stick.

But once past the age of reproduction, nature and society both lose interest in your love life. Even if you return to school, or keep up your snowboarding skills, most of the folks around you are ineligibly young. Odds have increased astronomically that anyone your age you meet in a bar is a confirmed alcoholic. Church may still provide a meeting place for believers, but there aren’t many organized services for those who list “spiritual not religious” in their online profiles.

Yes, there is always online dating. I know a couple of folks who found life partners that way, a couple who thought they had but were later disillusioned, quite a few who made good friends, and a roughly equal number who simply gave up, discouraged. It’s probably a good option for those who tend to fall in the middle of the bell curve. They will, naturally, have a larger pool of potential partners from which to draw.

The rest of us are left perplexed: how do you find someone whose eccentricities are sufficiently complementary?

Human aggression, or something

No, I don't believe humans are "aggressive by nature" either. More precisely, humans possess impulses which might be considered aggressive, along with a lot of other impulses (which vary from person to person in bell curves like the one doodled for sociability, below). The aggressive impulse has survival value, but so do many impulses, and it makes no more sense—less, in fact—to label the species "aggressive," than to call it "sociable."

Impulses don't play out one at a time, nor do they function in a vacuum. There is a constant interaction, a complex dance, between multiple impulses, persons, social structures, sensory impressions and so on. One little drawing comes nowhere close to describing it fully.

October Villanelle

We dance because we must—
Dance, my friends, or weep:
All dignity is dust.

Past melody, we trust,
There is a beat to keep;
Therefore, dance we must.

Each movement we adjust
First to glide, then to leap,
Though dignity is dust.

We seldom pause for crust
Or cup, and briefly sleep;
Of course we dance because we must.

And always we are left nonplussed:
As pastorales, heedless, sweep
Our dignity to dust.

We are unable to distrust
Such rhythms, buried deep;
We only dance because we must
Know dignity is dust.

--Lisa Wilcox

More human behavior

Raw materials

Some days it seems as if the entire species is one seething mass of unexamined assumptions.

When we aren’t paying attention, we all tend to behave as if it’s possible for human beings to be …something other than human beings. We’d all be happy, healthy and morally upright if gender inequities were eliminated, true democracy instituted, the word of God made law, tribal lifestyles revived, corporations outlawed, breastfeeding banned in public—pick any utopian notion.

But would we? Can elephants be something other than elephants? Lizards, pigeons, luna moths something not envisioned in their respective genetic encoding? Is homo sapiens so different from other members of the Gaian family? What evidence supports this unexamined assumption?

Steven Pinker raises this question in The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature. He insists that there is such a thing as “human nature” and that human behavior tends to fall within certain recognizable parameters. In fact recent decades have seen quite a lot of research and speculation about what these givens might be and how immutable they are.

Our continued existence as a species now depends on our willingness to examine our own determinants, to understand and accept who we are. We must hope that amongst our basic instincts are some which can lead us away from self-destruction.

It might work like this...

Unreasonable accommodation OR the dilemma of attenuated feedback

My little toes began to hurt. Sharp pains, thickened calluses, and then small wounds the podiatrist called “ulcerations.” He explained that these, the outermost of my toes, tend to rotate so that their sides meet the ground, rather than the padded bottoms.

Huh.

No, there wasn’t really a way to prevent it, but if I wanted to come in whenever it got too uncomfortable, there were some minor outpatient procedures he’d perform to relieve the pain.

OK.

He didn’t know why it was worse for me in the summer. Was I more likely to go barefoot?

Not really.

Then one summer day I looked down at my Birkenstocks. My wonderful old Birkies, famous for molding themselves to the wearer’s feet. As mine had. They’d lovingly embraced my quirky little toes, accommodated dysfunctionality—and amplified it. They actually encouraged my toes to roll out.

Something comfortable which, in time, produced discomfort. All of which might be an argument for spending some time outside your comfort zone.

In fact, it’s a case of long-delayed consequences. It didn’t feel bad when the weather warmed and I first put the sandals on. It felt good. There was absolutely no reason to suppose the shoes would ever cause a problem. The problem only became perceptible months later.

So much is learned from consequences. We connect cause with effect, effect with cause. It’s difficult to do, however, when the consequences of an action are delayed beyond one’s event horizon. All around us we see the disasters, now, of unintended, unanticipated consequences.

How can we improve our ability to anticipate?