The need for/inevitability of magical thinking

We can laugh at the people buying their Make America Great Again hats (made in China) and chanting at Trump rallies for the return of a mis-remembered past.  It’s easy to see that they want something that is difficult (impossible) to deliver and that they want it with no particular effort on their part, beyond emotional affiliation to an Idea, as represented by a particular individual in front of them, an opportunity to emote collectively.

That’s easy.  Fun too, if you want to unleash your inner condescender…

Nastier, brutally harder and likely to lead to a short solitary life is the following: seeing those same dynamics among those of us who want a habitable planet.

As it becomes so-difficult-as-to-be-impossible to ignore the signs of the times, as it becomes impossible to see a narrative that leads to us getting out of this fix, this sixth great extinction, this anthropo-bad-scene, then we progressives – with the right bumper stickers in our brains-  are just as prone to the same kinds of magical thinking we can spot and deride in those Trump supporters.

We are clinging, will cling, to our own saints (Saint Greta is the obvious one), and our own magical incantations.  Not so much ‘build that wall’ as ‘3.5 per cent!’.  Not so much the 2020 election as a citizens’ assembly, as if that would solve anything, as if that would result in anything more than a confused shopping list that could then be killed off in the committees.

The one sticking point is that those on the reactionary right, the unreflecting nativist, ‘anti-reflexive’ blood and soil crowd don’t PRETEND to understand or desire nuance, complexity, difficulty.  There is black and white, good and evil, zero and sum.

On what passes for the resistance to such binary thinking, there is the ritual obeisance to complexity, emergent properties (hundredth monkey my fat arse) and to feedback loops. We go for timey-wimey feedback  loops, consilience, holarchy, ecosystems approaches. Or rather, we SAY we do, we’d like to believe that we do.  But by and large, we don’t.  Some of us don’t all the time, and it seems like all  of us don’t, at least some of the time.  It’s too hard – cognitively, emotionally, socially.  The temptation to slip into comforting half truths, where the sun in our eyes makes some of the lies worth believing, is so very strong.  And as nobody likes a smart-arse, nobody likes a buzz-killer.

Does any of this matter? I suppose not. If (as I suspect, and have thought for all my adult life, since about 1991 or so) ‘we’ as a species are not going to respond to this emergency with the kinds of actions that we need – that (to use a more recent term) avivocracy cannot rule – then why not let people have their illusions?  Why not let them spout their 3.5% baloney?  Where’s the harm?

Answers on a postcard please, to the usual address….

And, for the benefit of anyone who has wondered in late, the usual address is marcmywords@gmail.com

(The answer, of course – is that the harm is to our dignity. (or amour-propre, if we’re going to be cynical?) The thing that humans can be good at, on their good days, is to see things for what they are, not what we wish they were, what we think they ought to be.  Because then at least you can fail into the abyss, rather than flail into it.  But maybe that’s just me, reaching for theoretical comforts.)

Note to self –  neologism flalling – combination of flailing and falling?