Tip-Off #140 - A Bias for Hope
"The only way in which we can bring our creative resources into play is by underestimating the difficulty of a task.” - Albert O. Hirschman.
Remember when a Brooklyn artist tried to board a United Airlines flight with her peacock, Dexter? Despite purchasing a seat and providing a medical certificate for her emotional support animal, United barred their entry due to size and weight issues. This memorable incident, alongside others involving pit bulls, squirrels, and pigs at various airports, led airlines to establish clear guidelines, distinguishing between acceptable (kittens in a basket) and unacceptable (alligators, even on a leash) emotional support animals (ESAs). ESAs are now reduced to “pets.” What used to be dismissed as bizarre now calls for an update to the policy manual.
Meanwhile, since the 1960s, what is supposed to count is "liberation"—personally, socially, politically, and religiously. Hannah Arendt foresaw the irony: “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” Rallying for liberation and personal freedom has led to a proliferation of explicit norms and codes of conduct, almost exceeding conservative excesses.
Rules govern language, proper names, pronouns, gender, sexual orientation, and sexual intimacy, including holding hands, with the risk of being expelled, fired, “canceled,” or just ghosted. Liberal fundamentalism competes with conservative fundamentalism, illiberal democracy with liberal democracy, and authoritarianism with freedom. Mimetic rivalry is at a fever pitch.
We can no longer depend on higher grounding to guide our thinking. The old God promised a sense of cosmic order and comfort; other Absolutes were presumed universal. When that order effectively vanished, despite personal exceptions, the loss of it took away the cultural and social ground from under people's feet. Rules became a weather vane—or, more respectfully, a matter of democratic debate.
Authoritarians are never more intolerant than when forced to endure normative confusion. And so with liberals who have a unique talent for turning agreement into an argument. Nostalgia for absolutes is nonpartisan. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” (Yeats)
Choice chokes. A center may not hold, but the edges do. Most changes travel from the edges to the center, as seen in world religions and movements for justice. The death of God and the world's end are more easily imagined than the complex paths that actually lead to what comes next.
The distinguished economist and political scientist Albert Hirschman wrote in A Bias for Hope, “We lack detailed, tried-and-tested blueprints for the truly massive scale of social, economic, and technological change required, for instance, for transition to a zero-carbon economy—or for a post-capitalist transition of any kind.” These things could never be known in advance: the only way to figure them out would be to try. We learn by going where we have to go.
In his concept of “The Hiding Hand,” Hirschman argues that inspiration and creativity arise from taking on significant but seemingly unlikely projects, leading to ingenuity in overcoming unforeseen obstacles. Waiting to be sure is an excuse to do nothing.
This concept is not just more positive psychology, although it is good advice. It applies to international affairs on a global scale. Hirschman asserts, "Radical reformers are unlikely to generate the extraordinary social energy they need to achieve change unless they are exhilaratingly conscious of writing an entirely new page of human history”—the key word might be “exhilarated.”
Something the Devil fears more than righteousness may be breaking out. In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, he says: “There is a sort of laughter which I am afraid is of no help to us; I mean the kind of laughter which comes from Joy”: it connects people more deeply with each other, and with God. Gloom is the Devil’s territory. Joy has revolutionary potential.
Leaving the story before it fully starts means missing the excitement. It is like walking out of Hamlet in the first act, just as the main conflicts and motivations emerge. It is said that the pearl we seek can only be found at the story's end.
Notes and reading
Albert Hirschman (d. 2012) considered most large-scale development projects executive fantasies attractive but fragile, costly, and ineffective. Targeted plans are sturdier and have a domino effect. - Hirschman's interdisciplinary approach included insights from Kierkegaard, Durkheim, and Tocqueville. - An Intellectual Biography - Michele Alacevich (2021).
"The only way in which we can use our creative resources is by underestimating the difficulty of a task.”—Hirschman, Development Projects Observed (2014), 182. - “Radical reformers are unlikely to generate…” - The Essential Hirschman (2013), in “Political Economics and Possibilism.”
“Emotional support peacock barred. . .” - BBC News Channel print (January 31, 2018).
"What rough beast..." - W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems (1989), in “The Second Coming.”
“Most changes travel from the edges to the center…” - David Sloan Wilson, evolutionary biologist, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution (2019).
“We learn by going where we have to go.” - from Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Waking.”
“There is a sort of laughter which I am afraid is of no help to us; I mean the kind of laughter which comes from Joy.” - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters - Letter IX.
And,
“Fragilistas” -“that category of people who mistake the unknown for the nonexistent” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2014), 9.
About 2 + 2 = 5: (revised) https://williamgreen.substack.com/about
Whoa! I hope others catch your comment, too. Thanks for sharing this thought. So well said!
Hear him! "Authoritarians are never more intolerant than when forced to endure normative confusion. . . . Choice chokes. A center may not hold, but the edges do. Most changes travel from the edges to the center, as seen in world religions and movements for justice. The death of God and the world's end are more easily imagined than the complex paths that actually lead to what comes next." I love the distinction between the center and the edges, between the world's end and the complex paths to, like, tomorrow afternoon.
Walter Benjamin (a Jew hunted by Nazis) concurs, I think, but puts it in terms of the whole versus the fragment. In his preface to Benjamin's "One Way Street," Greil Marcus says Benjamin knew that what would be called totalitarianism "had to be resisted, even chipped away, even defeated, by the fragment: the street, the sign, the name, the face, the aphorism, the evanescent, the ephemeral, the worthless, the unimportant, the meaningless."