Happy new mess

Theories are great. Human beings try to understand themselves and the world around them using categories to make this possible. Statistics, hypotheses, ideas. This is just fine. But can we be flexible and free enough to step in and out of these categories?

I was thinking about this, when I came across Bourdieu’s interview by Laure Adler. He was telling the journalist about a card he had previously received from a friend, saying: ‘Happy new mess’ (in French Joyeux Bordel instead of Joyeux Noël = Merry Christmas). I more and more back this vision of the world where everything is complicated but not incomprehensible, where we can be in the dark without fumbling about.

Although nowadays everything is massive and global, some room should be left for the individual dimension: At the end of the day, the world is made of people and every single person is much more than a theory, fortunately or unfortunately. I very much liked Peggy McIntosh’s approach in her paper published in the book Educating citizen for global awareness, where she identifies four phases in building global awareness. Phase I means womanless and all white. Phase II admits ‘exceptional others’. Phase III is about coming to see and to understand local and global issues of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia and so on. It observes power systems and brings in issues of justice and care. But Phase III can be polarized and get arrested in victim studies. Then comes Phase IV, the phase of plural stories, plural experiences, everyone’s experience, anywhere in the world. In Phase IV everyone is a knower, everyone’s daily life is history, politics, literature, drama, economics, psychology and ecology. Within Phase IV, binary thinking is seen as too simple. These four first interactive phases point toward an eventual Phase V: a version in which the world of knowledge is redefined and reconstructed to include us all. The author considers it will take 100 to 200 years to conceive Phase V depending on which decisions we will make in the coming years. I believe we could actively be part of the building of this phase. We could teach our children and students not to be scared of ‘mess’ but rather to accept it and feel comfortable with it. Living with doubt, confusion and a ‘more disturbing’ (pluralistic, multinary) vision of things could be part of our approach to life and teaching. Art can help us with this. 

After all, it is just a matter of habit. We tend to be willing to control everything forgetting that this control-mania narrows our horizons and prevents us from ‘including’. ‘Excluding’ is indeed a form of rejection, of any kind, and rejection comes from fear. The same fear that keeps us away from “mess”. We just cannot bear the ‘non-understanding’ phase. We do not have enough space for it. A constant stepping back and moving forward, as a camera in a shooting, is needed in order to see the details without missing the overall view. Perhaps, we could teach our children and students to dig into stories with no fear, as well as to step back for a moment, every now and then, in order to grasp the global picture. As we could teach them not to be scared of the truth but, on the contrary, to actively look for it. As Bourdieu said: “People consider sociology as a sad subject matter, but I don’t agree with that. On the contrary, I think it is a ‘happy knowledge’ because it is the only one allowing us to get free of determinism”.   

All the above might call for a new and more inclusive concept of identity that I will call “transidentity”, which could go with a new wanted “transdisciplinarity”. Of course “identifying” comes from comparing with what is different, with the other, the alterity (if there was not diversity we would not even know who we are), but once we have experienced this difference and therefore become more conscious about ourselves, we can then access a broader understanding and challenge our sets.

Alterity can, for that matter, also be experienced within our own culture, when we find ourselves not being comfortable with the conformed “majority”. Majority and minority can indeed be relative concepts. We can easily find ourselves passing from a ‘majority condition’ to a ‘minority condition’.

Are we able to accept relativity? Can we deal with confusion? Can we live with mess? Can we include what is different?

I have often thought about the concept of community. In some countries and regions, the surrounding community is there to replace a lacking state and to help people in case of need. This is, in my opinion, a very positive thing but can this ‘community’ stretch enough to receive people from other countries/regions who experience the same social and economic condition and are just in the same need? Can a broader sense of “community” arise? Should the criteria of admission in this community be based on needs and not on ethnical origins? In this regards, I would like to mention a remarkable suggestion that Nel Noddings makes in her book, above mentioned, to replace the concept of ‘rights’ with the concept of ‘needs’, and to focus more on human beings and not that much on citizens.

All this is only possible if we develop more empathy. How could we make this happen? Should we introduce philosophy and ethics as mandatory subject matters in business, communication and administration schools? I have always thought that some economists, managers, politicians are able to make the decisions they make just because they have never seen hunger with their own eyes; they have never experienced directly discrimination, exclusion, injustice. Decisions are easier to make in an elegant office of a lavish building in a luxury street of a rich city. And television does not help at all with that because you just have to press a button and all those plagues become unreal. As if they never existed.

Should we strongly wish that mankind was attacked by a virus from inner space called empathy?  

E.