This was a Facebook post by me on this date two years ago. Seems pertinent when our fate is being glad-handed by governments beholden to billionaires and fossil fuel magnates at COP26…

We’ve been watching the new BBC series of ‘The Name of the Rose’ with John Turturro & it has really reinforced what a phenomenal novel that was. On tonight’s episode, there was a scene where they were mapping the library. I haven’t been able to track down the exact quote from the novel, but the television scene had Turturro responding to Adso’s question as to how he could figure out the design of the library from the outside, but not the inside as follows:

“God knows the world because he conceived it in his mind, as if from the outside, before it was created. And we do not know its rule because we live inside it, having found it already made.”

I was trying to express the other day how we, living within a socio-economic system, have difficulty imagining our way out of it. This is not a new thought by any means. It is the age old question of totality versus infinity – of the limited nature of knowledge, precisely because knowledge is the delimiting of the possible. This is why Kant brackets God, immortality and the ‘thing-in itself’, as possible objects of knowledge in Preface B of the first critique. This is why in the dialectical thinking of Hegel, followed by Marx, the ‘truth’ of a given historical era results in its collapse, because that truth can’t be realized within the organization of that era – and that truth becomes the basis of the organization of the next era of history.

Even in philosophy of science, this is the very structure of Thomas Kuhn’s idea of scientific revolution and the well documented paradigm shifts in scientific history – ‘and we do not know it’s rule because we live inside it, having found it already made’. Only viewing a paradigm from the outside can we map it, understand it, make it an object of knowledge.

While I don’t subscribe so much to the purely episodic nature of such thought, as I think there exist currents within every era, every form of organization, that when followed, ultimately lead to those revolutions, I do think that this idea very well describes the structural resistance to those currents – precisely because those currents point to something unknowable, unthinkable within the existing order.

We are now at such a place in our history as a species. A place where any number of long entrenched models of knowledge, society, economics, politics, identity are collapsing as new understandings and visions emerge. Some of these, such as misogyny, racism and hierarchical aristocracy, have a common thread throughout our history. Others like ‘nation-states’ and ‘capitalism’ are more recent fixtures. And it is hard to see our way out of it. It is hard to envision the other side of the divide, because ‘we live inside it, having found it already made.’

But it is imperative that we try, because given the precarious situation we’ve created vis a vis climate change, there won’t be much more history if we don’t.

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