Reality-check

HFP, Harvard University

     "Brilliant as [Lorraine] Daston’s account is, it falters in her sense of moral epistemology. She generally takes moral claims to be generated simply by the community, then imposed, subconsciously, onto the broader material world. If our norm-generation mechanisms are in poor repair, then the world can do little to help us. But this is surely wrong. A thousand times in history—a million, more likely—visionaries, prophets, artists, and philosophers have wandered away from the social world that made them and sat themselves in nature, to see what could be seen when you stop demanding that nature echo back precisely the creeds of your community. We can think here of Elijah or John the Baptist, Muhammad or the Buddha, or Christ. Closer to our own time, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson went to nature to find a renewed, energized version of America. Analogous solitudes have been sought and found even in prison cells—think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fyodor Dostoevsky. As much as all of these men’s cultural formations accompanied them into solitude, shaped what they would see, there is also—in nature, in reality—more than is contained in any philosophy or culture. The main things that are needed are silence and trust—and not just for the would-be prophets among us, but for all of us: teachers, policymakers, clerics, parents, humans of any stripe. Panicked catastrophism will only ensure that our challenged cultures stay brittle and stuck.
     "The turn to panic has been an immensely frustrating aspect of the past several years. The liberal establishment has gnashed its teeth, shrieked, buried its head in the sand, blamed its comeuppance on omnipotent Russian bots, anything to avoid going back to reality and seeing what it might have missed, how its cultures have been blind, how they could be refreshed. The ongoing advancement of postwar liberalism is not guaranteed by the dictates of nature. That is fine, or it had better be, because it is true. But what should we do with that fact? Here there are infinite options. We have to say it again, and keep saying it: There is always more to see in the world; the process of understanding is unending. There are ways for America to stay America, while gathering back in its various warring factions. One thing we can say for sure is that to keep giving voice to the shouted slogans of yesterday is not one of those ways. If America wants to return to a state of relative social peace, if it wants its various peoples to be at home in its world, it had better dispatch its incumbent prophets from the noisy, contentious town square immediately. New, more capacious visions are needed—great awakenings and reformations and renaissances still to be seen. Thankfully, beautifully, reality is waiting, and reality is never spent."

     Ian Marcus Corbin, "Deep down things in a time of panic," The hedgehog review:  critical reflections on contemporary culture 24, no. 3 (Fall 2022):  25-26 (20-26).