Wednesday Morning Reflections (Or, a Day After the Election)

Wednesday morning. Frost feathered on our lawns and parks. Leaves gossiping under hedges and in the dark shadows of porches. The election signs still up everywhere. "Black Lives Matter" on the marquee of the church at the corner. Syracuse always feels quiet in the mornings, but perhaps especially so today.

K. rose before I did this morning, returned to the bedroom with a cup of coffee. "News?" I asked. "Still going on," she said, a grimace on her face.

What is there to say the morning after an uncertain election?

Ever since a friend recommended it, I've been thinking about Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. I've already forgotten most of the book's details, but what's stayed with me is Kahneman's broad argument: We make use of heuristics to make sense of the world around us. One of the ways we come to deal with the complexity of the world is by simplifying it - we deploy our 'rules of thumb' to engage with the world around us. Kahneman's insight is - in part - the fact that most of these heuristics aren't actually born out in reality. So the point: We make our way through life in part by relying on these heuristics, many of which are born out of 'intuition' or 'feeling' or 'sense' and not actually by an understanding of risk, probability, complexity, etc.

I've also been haunted by Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement. He writes at the beginning of the book:

In a substantially altered world... when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they - what can they - do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of Great Derangement. (p. 11)

So one of the questions that Ghosh sets out to understand is the role of the cultural matrix that both expresses and conceals - both provides us with artifacts and commodities that are charged with a sort of desire even as it glosses over the material, climatic, ecological conditions of the world around us.

I've been teaching a course called 'Geography of Religion' this semester - it's good and fascinating for all sorts of reasons, especially because teaching always provides an opportunity for me to clarify what I'm thinking to myself. One of the starting points for our work was the observation was that there's no 'fixed' or 'true' definition of religion; instead, I've been trying to suggest that we should pay more attention to how religion is being defined by specific groups in particular times and places. "Oh," my students replied, "you mean it's just a subjective definition. Religion is just what people say it is." Their response is a smart one and it helped me to refine what I feel like the core issue really is. Our focus shouldn't be either on the 'true' definition or the 'subjective' experience but instead on the way that individuals, groups, and communities come to develop a shared sense of who they are.

But because it's a geography of religion, the key shift is that we need to focus not only on how people come to share a sense of who they are but also of where they are. We're always in a place, geographers tell us, but we're not necessarily in the same place. How do we develop a shared sense of being in a place? There are lots of different ways to get at answering that question, but this is where Kahneman's work is so useful - what if our experience of place, our sense of judgements about the way that the world worked and how we were connected to it in relations of exploitation and obligation and responsibility and pleasure and imagination, what if that experience was itself shaped by a set of heuristics?

I often return to Michael Curry's discussion of place: "In the topographic tradition," he writes, "one creates a new place by acting, routinizing, narrating, and in the process creating an account of what constitutes a place, of what in a place is possible and what is not possible" ("Toward a Geography of a World Without Maps," p. 683-84). These dimensions of acting, routinizing, narrating, and creating might be better understood not as an intentional, rational act but instead based on what Kahneman calls 'fast' thinking - the work of intuition and expectation.

To live in the world is to inhabit places - but rather than begin with the legible places that we think we know (America, New York, Syracuse), I wonder if we might be better served by beginning with the range of all the possible ways that people might understand who they are in relation to where they are.

This is a lot of inchoate discussion - but I think it bears on the election in at least two ways.

The first involves the project of making sense of the election results. How do we conceptualize - and thus seek to explain - how and why people voted in the ways that they did. We're given categories (right, left, liberal, conservative, independent, Republican, Democrat, white, Black, Latino, suburbs), but I wonder if we might be better served by focusing on the connections. In other words, instead of asking how a given factor shaped someone's vote (and leaping from there to a discussion of electoral geography), maybe we should ask: What are the ways that people connect themselves to the world around them and thus define a place and the people who belong there? That place might be defined by physical proximity, but it can also mobilize a sense of connection to the world that spans scales and temporalities in ways that we don't necessarily expect.

The second involves the ongoing project of organizing for the political vision that I (we) would like to see. How do we convince someone to expand their sense of place and who might belong? There's one powerful way of thinking about place - let's call it the 'pie model' - where more people means less pie. And so politics becomes a matter of protecting one's pie. That seems the wrong route to go - not least because in the background of all of this is a rapidly changing climate system. But how do we cultivate a different sense of connection?

And - if nothing else - a call to document where I am and what I'm thinking about. In a future world, what will they read into our stories, narratives, and geographies?