#woolf's darkness

I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death.

The future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be... In the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most.

My friend Chip Ward speaks of "the tyranny of the quantifiable," of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilisation worth having. The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism. Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can't count what matters. The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favour of subtleties, of pleasures money can't buy and corporations can't command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the exploratory, the numinous, the uncertain.

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable. Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future, in [Laurence] Gonzalez's resonant phrase. Optimism is similarly confidence about what will happen. Both are grounds not for acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans; . . .

As I began writing this essay, I picked up a book on wilderness survival by Laurence Gonzalez and found in it this telling sentence, "The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits." His point is that when the two seem incompatible we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness. Gonzalez adds, "Researchers point out that people tend to take away information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it's easy to see what we want to see."

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.

I argued that you don’t know if your actions are futile; that you don’t have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or imagine.

While reading Rebecca Solnit’s short essay collection Men Explain Things to Me, the notion she ascribed to Chip Ward of the “tyranny of the quantifiable,” that, “the way what can be measured almost always takes precedent over what cannot…” (Woolf’s Darkness) started something in me.  I searched for an expansion of this idea, from either of the two and from anyone else, but found little.  This insight sunk its hooks into me, persistent and subtle, as my sense of it bubbled up forthcoming questions and tied back to ones that had found a home in my web of personal interest long before.  A single post-it note lives on my work monitor with a quote pulled from Eviner and Hawkes 2008, “‘It depends’ may very well be the one unifying simple principle of ecological science, making studies of context dependence a critical frontier in both the theory and application of ecological science.” That seems to be the source of my curiosity, why I find ecology, soil science, and pretty much everything else I care about so deeply unnerving and important. The sorts of questions best answered with “it depends” are the ones I want to live.