When The Centre Will Not Hold
Navigating the space where world-views collide is dangerous… but it is essential if we are to make sense of a post-truth world
This evening, I found myself taking yet another of the long existential sighs that help ground me whenever I look at a disturbing news headline or Twitter feed or even a friend’s Facebook status update.
After learning about the attack in New York, after contemplating the ugliness the protests against farm murders in South Africa had devolved into, after considering the political invective that is inflaming everything we think and breathe and say, I remembered a quote from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, “Heart of Darkness”. It’s a book I neither liked nor fully appreciated when it was a prescribed work in English Lit 101 way back in 1995, but Conrad’s words are burning themselves inside my skull right now:
Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
Ow.
That’s pretty much 21st century identity politics summed up. And it worries me, because somehow, somewhere, in mistaking simplicity for security, we became afraid of nuance. Of complexity. Of looking outward.
It’s human of us to have an opinion on everything. (This entire piece is fuelled by my own opinions)
It’s natural to want to share our opinions and have them validated. (Why else would I post it online? Press that like button already. I need the dopamine.)
But when we use these opinions as weapons, when we feel the only way to get our point across is to bludgeon others into submission with our world-views, we are not in Kansas anymore. The twister that sucked us up has also not deposited us in some angry version of Oz, but into a Bermuda Triangle where things can be “post-truth” and facts can be “alternative”.
Where I live, people of all shapes, colours, and food allergies are justifiably pissed off. The ruling party has repeatedly failed to deliver its promises to the people. Instead it willingly hosts a parasitic infection of patronage, corruption and populist posturings. Violence against women and children continues its ghastly surge. Young people are plagued by poverty and unemployment, while more than two decades after apartheid officially ended, colonialism is still alive and drinking Chardonnay in the verdant suburbs of Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Scanning the news abroad, I find there is no solace except for the distraction (and sometimes schadenfreude) that comes with realising the faultlines are global. To be fair, 2016 was such a horrible year for so many that I’ve spent most of 2017 in denial. It’s November, and the shitstorm hasn’t abated at all. It’s spun itself into a planet-sized hurricane.
The Trump Presidency and Brexit have unwittingly advanced globalisation to the point where ordinary South Africans can classify themselves as either Republican or Democrat, Remain or Leave, or Catalan or Castilian, resulting in incendiary online spats, increasingly unfunny memes and ruined family lunches.
It’s not that everyone has opinions, or even that some of these opinions are absurd or downright certifiable. It’s because more and more are being assholes about whatever they believe.
Think how seemingly reasonable words like “conservative”, “liberal”, and “social justice” have become so divorced from their original meanings that they are now used wholesale as slurs.
It’s as if we have woken up in a version of Huxley’s Brave New World where the only classes are Right and Left, composed respectively of either genocidal white supremacist trolls with castration anxiety or depraved libertines mixing the blood of unborn children into their organic kale lattes.
In this Manichean chaos, humanity loses its complexity, and does so at an alarming pace.
Gone is the space to want social justice but a free market.
Ludicrous is the notion that you can understand your faith’s more traditional definition of marriage, while being delighted that Brad and Eric next door are finally tying the knot and hope you’ve been invited.
Nonsensical is the possibility that a white man could listen to a black woman’s continued struggles against patriarchy and racism without becoming defensive and obstructive.
The very idea of a Middle Ground becomes as fantastical as Middle Earth, until life is reduced to a Celebrity Death Match between Katie Hopkins and Katy Perry.
For when moderates are savaged by their more radical peers for daring to consider the other side’s point of view, democracy starts dying.
For when the purpose of our arguments are “I told you so” or “I know more than you” rather than “I’d like to know more” or “I’d like to find the truth”, we pull ourselves further and further apart from that uncomfortable but necessary centre where emotion must give way to consideration.
We will never agree on everything, and that’s all right.
But if we don’t all start recognising the limits of our understanding we soon won’t agree on anything.
And so I take another deep, long, existential sigh.
