67. DISPATCHES FROM THE CAVE - Why Being "Realistic" Demands The Impossible

Until the pandemic, if someone had raised the question of why they had to commute every day into a busy office in an expensive city just to work at a desk on a computer when they could do the exact same work in their home they would be looked at as someone who doesn’t understand how “the real world” works. If I, as a teacher, suggested that there might be better ways of assessing my students than through formal examination, I would be told I was being “unrealistic”. If you had suggested using empty rooms in luxury hotels to house the homeless or getting the government to pay people’s wages so that they don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from if their place of work is closed, people would have shaken their heads at your naiveté and lack of understanding about the limits of political possibility. But the pandemic has shown just how flimsy “the way things are” actually are. From basic norms of social interaction to entire economic systems, COVID-19 has unwittingly acted as the liberating hand breaking the chains of Plato’s epistemological prisoner and dragging them out of the cave and into the light. Faced with an existential threat, the rules and procedures we’d erected, the parameters of possibility and limits and boundaries unconsciously agreed to all became open to debate. Their previous justification now exposed in the face of this new crisis, we were forced to adapt or perish, but the flexibility we showed there was in which to adapt put the lie to the previous narrative that all of this was settled. It turned out we had settled only on the tacit agreement that we didn’t want to shake up the current world order because it was working out OK for us (or at least for those in power). As soon as it became clear it no longer worked, we dropped the veil of pretence and jettisoned everything that was now a danger. All around the world, the places where COVID-19 continues to ravage societies are those places where a return to that old, flawed world order as soon as possible was rushed into place as soon as the first wave died down (for fear of new ways of doing things taking seed and planting roots that could no longer be removed), or where beliefs about what has to be were too rigidly put in place and so never adapted to the new situation, allowing the virus a place in which to continue to spread.

This isn’t, however, a post about the coronavirus. It is a piece about how easily we fall into the trap of believing the illusions on the walls of our cave are reality despite the repeated glimpses we are shown regularly of the sun shining bright on actual reality elsewhere.

Take, for instance, Donald Trump. Since the election of Joe Biden, Trump exists like a sad class bully everyone has seen reduced to what they really are after being publicly told off by the head teacher. His tweets, once so damagingly toxic, now carry warning labels about their inaccuracy and distortions, allowing them to be ignored. His statements are immediately denied and fact-checked by not only major media outlets, but by fellow politicians and other officials. Trump has been effectively de-fanged by the courts, by the media, and by his peers in politics, transformed from the most powerful person in the world to a sideshow spectacle of failing hubris and future criminal action. But what is important to realise here is that Donald Trump himself has not changed. Because of the curious nature of American democracy, he is not even no longer the President, and holds onto that position until the Biden inauguration in January. What has changed is simply the way in which the fact of Donald Trump is being received and interpreted by the rest of the world. A decision has been made, seemingly collectively, to restore a shared sense of reality to America. Rather than accept the post-truth world that Trump and his trolls insisted on disrupting our epistemic norms with, after four years it seems people are finally fighting back by picking at least one set of facts - the election results - and insisting upon them as being something which rise above the level of mere opinion. Again - existential threat, this time to American democracy and its institutions - have caused an awakening and a perceptual pivot that we cannot simply continue accepting the illusions of the cave. To do so might be to die there, choking on the flames of illusory fire. But what is sad is considering all those years of bile and damage done by Trump and his followers - the progress lost, the lives ruined or made more difficult, the nearly three hundred thousand people dead of COVID-19 because they had been primed to ignore objective science and lean in to unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, the climate catastrophe further facilitated by the same celebration of ignorance, etc… As Trump himself has not changed, it is now on us that his “success” can be blamed. Where were the Twitter warnings and denunciations four years ago? Where was the commitment to fact over fiction? Just as we had the technology to work from home, alternatives to examination, shelter for the homeless and the concept of universal basic income years before they were forced into practice by this pandemic, we had the means to reject Donald Trump at our disposal the whole time he was performing his smash and grab over objective reality. But we failed to use them because, well, Trump was “the way things are” and to stand against it would have been to be “unrealistic”.

As co-ordinator of my school’s Student Council I was speaking to our acting Head Teacher the other day about the latest Council issues. As usual, being students at the school and the actual people with the lived experience of what it is like to be the recipient of all the initiatives and ideas we adults implement on their behalf, they have a lot of alternative visions for how things could be despite our best efforts. The great thing about kids is that they don’t have heads muddied with the obstacles of budgets, limited resources, competing demands, and all the other causes of compromise which lead to what becomes accepted as “best practice” in schools. They simply see a need, or a problem, and tell us what should be done, usually as if the answer is obvious and its annoying we haven’t thought of it. “Why don’t we just have more laptops so everyone can access the online stuff?” “Why not put in some extra toilets?” “Why do we put up with these caterers when no one likes their food?” “Why do we do it this way when we could do it like this instead”…

I love hearing their ideas. Sometimes I have the depressing job of explaining to them the boring whys and wherefores about why their ideas aren’t possible - economies of scale, rationales the school have failed to articulate, long-term plans that they aren’t privy to and won’t benefit from but which already address what they are seeking. Most of the time though, they present great insights and new alternative ways of doing things which they then go on to raise with the school’s various powers that be. And what annoys me, each and every year, is that many of these great ideas are shot down with some new variation of “because that’s not how we do things here” as the excuse. A response which always elicits from me the follow up question: “but why does that mean it can’t be how we do them from now on?” Unfortunately, schools being the inherently authoritarian hierarchies that they are, not accepting the first “no” for an answer and pursuing something which has already been shut down is too often considered “insolence”, especially when it comes from a student considered to be low in the top-down hierarchy. When speaking to the acting Head Teacher the other day, this viewpoint was articulated as follows: “I just wish sometimes the Student Council would work with us and not against us”. The underlying idea being that suggesting the school do something different than what they currently plan to do is “working against” them and accepting things as they are - thus rendering the Council largely useless - is “working with” them. Yet time and time again it is the ideas raised by the rebels, be they members of the Student Council or critical members of staff, that end up eventually owning the day. What was rejected as impossible today will no doubt be policy in a year or two, once that initial hostility to change and sense of imposition has been overcome, good ideas fester and gnaw. They come back to haunt. They lay dormant, and then they win. Especially when the rejected idea presents itself as a solution to an existential crisis - meeting the latest demands from Oftsed, responding to a growing workload issue, improving staff or student morale, etc…

Because “the way the world works” is always only “the way the world works right now” and is always subject to change. We become trapped in an illusion of reality when we forget that and mistake the contingent and the temporary for the permanent and immutable. There are facts - there is a coronavirus, an authoritarian tyrant in the White House, a thousand kids all trying to get a good education in a school - but how we respond to those facts and set up our lives and routines - our way of doing things - around them should always be reflective and responsive to changes, open to new experiments and alternative ideas. As the old anarchist saying goes: demand the impossible. To rigidly stick to being “realistic” in a world where what is “real” is determined by a completely arbitrary set of ideas about what we want to be real or not is a fool’s game, and one which condemns far too many to unliveable lives and miserable conditions when, in reality, the possibilities are endless and lives could be radically changed for the better with a decision to simply make it so.

So next time someone tells you that you are being unrealistic about how you wish the world to be, remind them that every decade’s norms seem unrealistic to the people living the decade before, and that if something we want is unrealistic right now that is not a reason to drop the good idea, it is a motivation to transform the conditions of reality until the impossible becomes the undeniable.

Author: DaN McKee

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