This week, I’ve been thinking about figuring out how to act in the world when we genuinely don’t understand what’s happening in the world.
Last Sunday night, I was reading an article about one particular aspect of the instabilities in the global economy caused by the authoritarian regime in the United States. As I was reading it, I was very conscious of not really understanding. Partly that was because, at least at that moment, the experts quoted in the article themselves couldn’t fully explain what was going on. But partly, it was because I don’t know anything about the arcane dynamics of the global financial system, so I had no basis for forming any sort of analysis or even well-grounded opinion of my own.
As I thought about it, I realized that there are actually a bunch of ways that we regularly get confronted with a world that we need to live in, and that probably we should act to change if we are committed to social justice and collective liberation, but that we don’t understand nearly as fully as we want or need.
Some of that is because powerful actors themselves – and I’m looking specifically at the White House here – sometimes don’t seem to know what they’re doing from one day to the next, and we just have to roll with that very disorienting reality. Some of it is because there is some clear future decision point that just hasn’t been reached yet, like our current federal election here in Canada – we don’t know who’s going to win, so we don’t know exactly what kind of regime we’re going to be facing after April 28. And some is just a sort of constitutive characteristic of being human, in that there are always limits to what we do and can know, and we still have to live and act. Whether we’re trying to understand things happening in the broader world, or we’re in some sort of collective struggle – a local one in our workplace or community, or something as world-spanning as trying to challenge the forces causing the climate crisis – our knowledge of the situation we face is always imperfect, and often very, very partial.
So in the face of all of this not-knowing, how do we act in the world?
I have two answers to that. I’m definitely not even close to capturing everything that’s relevant, and I’m sure there’s lots that I’m missing entirely, but this is what I’ve come up with so far.
The first answer is that we need to accept that we don’t need to have perfect knowledge to act. If we know there is pain, then we act as best we can to stop the pain. If we feel or see injustice, we do something about it. And we learn in the course of struggle, we teach each other, we do our best. It’s the ongoing care and commitment, including commitment to learning together and doing better, that matters.
My other answer is specifically about the knowing side of it. I think this sense of not-knowing is part of what drives some of us — me included — to seek knowledge about the world in the churn of social media. This is knowledge of the now, of what new atrocity, what new outrage, and if we’re lucky what new resistance. It is algorithmically distorted knowledge that is often good at making us feel things, but rather less good at helping us know and do things — that’s not always true, but it often is. And obviously we need some of this breaking news-style knowledge. But I think one thing we need to do is let go of the illusion that that kind of knowing is what’s going to help us understand the world well enough to be able to change it.
With all due respect to people’s different constraints and capacities, people’s different ways of learning, I think we need to put more emphasis on reading nonfiction books and consuming other kinds of thoughtful, rigorous, long-form content, in whatever medium. I think that along with the collaborative learning that happens in the course of struggle, that is how we get to know things that help us respond not only to the crisis of the moment, but to deeper causes, deeper problems.
Not-knowing and needing to act anyway is inevitable, and we need to make our peace with doing our best in the face of that. But I think directing our attention in ways that are not consumed by the churn right in front of our faces, but that can give us tools to dig under that churn, is going to put us in a better place to meaningfully intervene in the world.