Tip-Off #180 – Time out
“Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?” – Ursula Le Guin.
Somebody called the modern ideology—a principle that governs everyday life— “solutionism.” Even existentialists still around have a solution: make your own.
We have one solution after another, glad to find problems. Patriots thrive on deporting aliens; conservatives blame liberals for causing the problem, and liberals know it’s the conservatives’ fault. The president needs to be crazy to make sense, as much as the cynics need nonsense to make a living. A good entrepreneur will solve still more problems if we get tired of our own. When the hook is “Your problem matters,” whatever package of vitamins gets thrown in the bag is almost beside the point. We look for solutions that don’t work for problems we don’t have.
In his novel The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy has one character who says that his problems made him feel good. The protagonist says, “It was his impression that not just he but other people too felt better in hurricanes.” In an earlier essay, Percy had asked about feeling better in bad environments and worse in pleasant places. He said it’s a matter of how we frame the question, not finding the answer—what counts is what we’re expected to believe, not what we actually believe. (A sunny day is more pressure to be happy.)
Science wants a better explanation. In her article “The Strange Blissfulness of Storms,” a journalist reports that research at Oxford and Cambridge shows that biochemistry is the solution. Extreme weather makes us feel better because of something called “negative ion densities,” which also explains why we sing in the shower, most joyfully, with clouds of steam.
Perhaps negative ions can explain a recent response to the question, “How do you know those planes crashed because the FAA believes in diversity?” “I have common sense.” That is another way to feel good in a bad environment.
The celebrated science fiction author Ursula Le Guin made sense by showing how to handle nonsense. In her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, she begins with a fierce, counterintuitive introduction. “Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
Viewed this way, Le Guin examines another world like ours where prediction and uncertainty coexist, suggesting that wisdom lies not in knowing solutions but in understanding which questions defy answers. Her characters learn to quit thinking they can conquer ambiguity and instead welcome its necessity. “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” As one of her characters says, “I want to exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”
This is “no country for old men,” as another title has it, although for now, it may be. Living with problems that don’t have solutions is hard in a culture as broken as ours. But there is no way of telling the truth without causing more trouble.
That’s not much comfort. Neither is “huddling together in the pale light of answers to questions we’re afraid to ask.” Le Guin says, “Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees but sees not. Some things outweigh comfort unless one is an old woman or a cat.”
“Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.”
– Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (2022)
A Brief for the Defense
About 2 + 2 = 5