A Problem Problem

It is not necessary to fathom the ground or the structure of everything in order to know what to make of it. Stones do not disconcert a builder because he may not happen to know what they are chemically; and so the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the Babel of society, need not disturb the genial observer, though he may be incapable of unravelling them. He may set these dark spots down in their places, like so many caves or wells in a landscape, without feeling bound to scrutinise their depths simply because their depths are obscure.

George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913)

Wake up and smell the coffee - we’ve all heard that one, it’s too common to be anything but a cliché even though it encapsulates a problem we often have when arguing against conventional but blatantly dubious points of view. Sometimes conventional viewpoints seem to owe more to dreamlike fantasy than analysis, as if those who subscribe to them really should wake up and smell the metaphorical coffee. 

We navigate through life by avoiding surprises because surprises have to be resolved and that involves effort and risk. Avoiding surprises is the low risk, low effort way to go. Also the most efficient in that we avoid unnecessary expenditure of energy, especially cerebral energy. What counts as a surprise though?

In one sense, a surprise is problem to be resolved, but here we seem to have a key difference in how people perceive certain social and political problems. Not a sharp difference with no overlap, but one of those fuzzy differences which are nevertheless real and important.

We could attempt to clarify this by saying that some people are reality-bound. They take reality as the ultimate arbiter of what counts as a problem. All problems are aspects of the real world and have to be defined as such even if they are social problems or problems of human behaviour. They navigate through life by avoiding inadequate descriptions of reality in favour of better ones. Frequently this requires us to acknowledge uncertainties without feeling bound to scrutinise their depths simply because their depths are obscure.

Others are more socially-bound, although everyone is of course both. But some people seem to sleepwalk into a social consensus they cannot analyse objectively. To do so would be deemed socially inappropriate even if uncertainties are an inescapable aspect of the problem. In these situations, socially appropriate equates to true – there is nothing beyond it. Socially inappropriate is to be ignored or made to go away.

Social hierarchies could be guided by real world problem-solvers but too often they are not. They are frequently guided by those who peddle socially appropriate answers which cannot be analysed objectively. The battle lines are drawn, the abuse begins and problem-solvers are left beyond the pale.

Then reality takes over.