Warning: Convolution ahead!
Several conversations over the past week have touched on the challenge of making or maintaining political commitments in the face of complexity or ambiguity. Maybe this is John Kerry’s problem: Kerry’s primary motivation right now is to avoid alienating potential voters, but his carefully crafted statements and inevitable restatements also reflect awareness that political issues are often gray rather than black and white. George W. Bush comes off as a firmer believer because to him the world really is a simple dichotomous place. This brings to mind social psychologist Phil Tetlock’s work years ago, which claimed conservatives sound more definite because they only seek one goal (freedom) whereas liberals sound hesitant because they’re trying the more difficult task of balancing two goals (freedom and equality).
The academics among us should recognize this dynamic, if not in our own work (never!) then in that of many others. We always know “more research needs to be done” before we can draw firm conclusions. Academics who remain comfortably above the fray can sustain this hands-off approach and even make money as objective, nonpartisan, in-the-middle consultants. But those who try to take academic knowledge into the political realm have to get past the dogmatic refusal to take a stand, knowing that if we wait until every loose end is resolved no action will ever be taken.
Once in the political fray, though, what I’ve found is that many activists on all sides of many issues have moved from complexity not just to commitment but to oversimplicity. Too often, political arguments are based on a mixture of misinformation and a determined refusal or inability to confront the other side’s best arguments head on. It’s easier to mock the other side’s silliness than to counter their good points.
In writing my regular newspaper column for my local weekly, I’ve learned that my academic friends especially like the pieces that ask a lot of good questions but don’t answer them; they like to hear how complex the underlying issue is, whatever the topic. They don’t show as much appreciation when I skip over the complexity and just make my point.
When I wrote about this a couple of years ago in Salon, in an article about difficulties some in the pro-Palestinian left have making good arguments, I got trashed by Alexander Cockburn, who seems to think anyone not agreeing with him 100 percent is an idiot (or, as he put it in my case, an apologist for Ariel Sharon). It wasn’t much fun playing Kerry to Cockburn’s Bush.
On the other hand, I do recognize that my own efforts to write about Israel and Palestine haven’t always been as clear as what I write about other issues. Sometimes they require readers to carefully read what I’m saying. My hesitations on this issue — my carefully constructed, somewhere-in-the-middle effort to be practical — has little resemblance to my stands on other complex issues. I’m comfortable calling for an end to corporations, to law as we know it, to most forms of technology, though I know these are complex issues and that my position is “unrealistic.” My ambivalence about Israel seems out of character, explained more by my past history as a young Zionist, my Jewish identity, and my continuing ties to Jewish family and friends than by what seem to me to be the relevant principles.
That’s one reason I’m going to Israel and Palestine in December. Maybe the trip will help push me out of the comfortably complex, not always useful, middle.
Or maybe I’ll decide everything else is just more complex than I thought.
Thanks for this – made me think of my own areas of (over) certainty and (over) complexity… I attended a conference on critical trauma studies recently expecting to hear (and agree with) all the usual stuff (individualizing problems rather than seeing them in their social context is bad, medicalizing them is bad, crafting a pseudo-technical jargon aroound them – ala DSM4 – is bad blah blah). Luckily there were a few nay-sayers at the conference who forced the rest of us to think a little more carefully, to formulate for ourselves in a more nuanced way exactly when and why and under what circumstances approaching something as an individual medical problem is bad. Hope you enjoy the Israel trip.