Tell me if you’ve heard this before: we live in uncertain times.
Or, tell me if you’ve felt or heard this response to a news item: “It’s complicated.” I think it’s all over the place. Some of the most pressing subjects and events of our era usually get tossed in one of these two bins: uncertain or complicated.
Whether border control, climate change, public health, A.I., the economy, trans rights, wars. It all can be hard to talk about because it’s complicated or uncertain.
But what if language — how we think and talk about these challenges — was part of the key to taking on these problems? The times aren’t uncertain. Our language just makes it feel that way.
Writer Natasha Lennard has some ideas for how to approach that language. She has written a dynamite-like book: small and trim, but with an explosive set of ideas around the most pressing political topics of today. On Un/Certainty: The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times cracks open our language and leans on a library of philosophical work, including most notably early 20th centuryAustrian Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty to show how to question many of our bedrock certainties.
Certainties like “the border is insecure.” A statement like this often assumes there is a a firehose border invasion when there is not. Border insecurity rhetoric also often ignores the harmful role poverty plays in causing people to leave home countries — not mention the reasons for why 117.8 million people are displaced around the world.
Or take the conviction that we need artificial “super intelligence” to solve climate change when people have known for decades what causes climate change. Intelligence isn’t the problem. Even if tech hype men sell the idea that more intelligence will solve global problems like climate change.
But don’t be confused, this isn’t a book mapping how to argue with a Fox News devotee or a Chuck Schumer super fan. “This is not about how you convince the convinced,” Natasha told me on the latest Book Stuff episode.
Natasha’s book is about how you build left-leaning collations that aim to create more freedom and more stability for more people around the globe. The first brick in that collation usually starts with an idea or a need, even a few words on a big topic. Once you have enough people rallied around new political ideas, a new certainty, you’re ready to take on power of the old and current ideas. Then you can, in Natasha’s words, build “counterforces to displace their role in power.”
In the latest episode Natasha shares modern-day examples of new political realities and how philosophy is a good tool for thinking about politics. She also weighs in on the Ed Sheeran backlash over Palestine, and revisits a lesson from an Occupy Wall Street friend.
Enjoy this episode on the Book Stuff website and on Apple and Spotify.
Stay curious, keep reading.
