Whatever

 I live by the parable of the blind men and the elephant. I am convinced that we tell stories of truths seen through a lens that lets certain light - facts or information - through while blocking things that others might see. In doing so, we seldom - and maybe don't ever - get the whole big picture. You know the story. The earliest versions of it go back to the Tittha Sutta, a text from 500 B.C. when the Buddha was alive. But most of us know the version penned by the poet John Godfrey Saxe - about six blind men who come upon an elephant.  One of them, puts his hands on the tusk and declares that an elephant is "round and very hard." A second, touching the tail, sees it as "thin like a rope." A third puts his hand on the side of the elephant and describes it as a wall. None see the whole elephant.

Not all reality is about missing the whole for the parts. Sometimes it's about truth and falsehood, and not about partial perception. But most people, I think, lack the ability to stand back and question their own convictions and wonder if their life experience is sufficient to perceive nuances. Pessimists are inclined to see the glass half-empty, optimists as half-full, and even when they get things right, they might not do so for the right reasons. My father used to annoy the hell out of my by declaring, "Even a clock that is stopped is right twice a day." I was pissed that he didn't seem to want to distinguish between being right because one get to truth for the right reasons, and not by accident.

This is a difficult time to be alive if you focus on the apparently real possibility that Donald Trump could become president again in 2024, and use the willingness of so many Americans to let go of democracy and repeat the colossal error of the Weimar Republic and give power to a strongman simply because he knows how to tap into fears of chaos and the possibility that things are changing too fast, and in the wrong direction. I'm feeling quite glass-half-empty these days when I look at floods and forest fires and other indications that we may not have halted climate change in time, when Putin appears to be winning the war in Ukraine, when Covid continues to kill and incapacitate people right and left, when Israel's solution to the barbaric attack on its people by Hamas is to kill thousands of children in Gaza and unabashedly claim their deaths are unavoidable. The only thing, practically, that keeps me from despair is the parable of the blind men and the elephant. I'm hoping I'm simply failing to see the whole picture.

Nuanced thinking is underrated. Particularly in dumbed-down America where we have convinced ourselves that the right to hold an opinion is the same thing as the right to declare what is factual and what is not. I just listened to a German talk-show in which the participants were arguing over whether Israel was an apartheid state. Their conclusion? Many Israeli policies are the policies of an apartheid state, yes, particularly in the West Bank, where settlers are getting away with brazenly illegal government-support of pushing Palestinians out of their homes. But we should not use the word apartheid because Israel's greatest fear is being wiped out themselves, and everybody knows that in South Africa, where the notion of apartheid originates, the victims of it eventually took over. And that means admitting they have an apartheid government means that they will eventually be overcome by their Arab minority living among them and subject to their wishes. The talk-show participants were saying, in effect, "yes Israel is an apartheid state, but we will not win friends and influence people in Israel by saying so." Same with calling Israel a colonizer state. The focus needs to go back onto the striving for a two-state solution.

Normally I would argue for simple plain truth expressed in simple plain language and call this approach an obfuscation, a manipulation of language for political ends, a form of insincerity. But in this particular case, I prefer a Realpolitik. Just as I believe the starting place for any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma should be that the Israeli state is a given reality, and don't need or want to haul out the entire history of the Zionist project, I think there are times when life counts more than death and peace counts more than violence, and those ends are unattainable without nuanced thinking.

And now let me do something I know is going to feel like switching horses mid-stream. Let me move to different and unrelated topic and think out loud for a minute about the line between fact and opinion, which line we seem to have lost of late in America.  Opinion, and its companion, taste, are not the same thing at all as truth and a preference for facts. I've been thinking a lot about this distinction and the consequences of our having so badly blurred the line. 

Thanks to the internet, and YouTube in particular, we now have access to things people in previous generations never even dreamed of. We can bring to our immediate attention almost anything ever written or said. In my case, I've been listening to best-in-the-world performances by classical pianists, for example, for some time now. I have my favorites - Alexander Malofeev, the Jussen Brothers, Yuja Wang, Vyacheslav Gryaznov, Martha Argerich, to name a few that come first to mind, in no particular order, and without any attempt to rank them.  I have my favorite pieces that I listen to over and over again. There is Alexander Malofeev playing Tchaikovsky's Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker Suite. There is Vyacheslav Gryaznov playing Rachmaninoff's Italian Polka. There is the Jussen Brothers playing Strauss' Fledermaus encore, all of which I've heard dozens of times. These pieces ground me. Not as "best" in any real sense in terms of technique or style or all-around beautiful pieces, but go-to music that makes me feel good, and bring balance back into my life. It has taken me a lifetime to recognize, however, that when it comes to esthetic experiences, I need to stop seeking out experts to tell me how to evaluate them. While careful study of music and paintings and dance and you-name-it forms of art definitely do enhance the pleasure of it, it doesn't determine whether or to what degree it is going to give me pleasure.

I've come to really dislike the ranking of great artists.  I know I can't prevent others from doing it, from praising or criticizing Van Cliburn and Vladimir Horowitz and Arcadi Volodos and Arthur Rubenstein and setting them up against each other. I just listened to a performance by Yunchan Lim of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto at the Van Cliburn competition in Fort Worth, Texas last year and got to my feet at the end, with tears in my eyes, in the privacy of my own bedroom with nobody else around. That happens sometimes. It was, to me, a perfect performance. Everything went right. The Steinway, the hall, Marin Alsop, that wonderful woman breaking into the all-male world of conducting - she too was in tears at the end of Yunchan's performance. In cowboy town Fort Worth, Texas, no less. For those who don't understand how beauty can sneak up on you. And don't miss the fact that this was not a recital or a concert.  He was being evaluated against others in a competition!

Most of those who went to the trouble of submitting a comment agreed with me this was a world-class performance, a magical talent being displayed. But there were those who complained the Steinway wasn't quite perfectly tuned or that Yunchan's touch wasn't quite up to the standard set by Arcadi Volodos. 

Some people are never satisfied, I said to myself. But, I couldn't help it, it sent me to YouTube, which, sure enough, had a recording of Arcadi Volodos doing what's now called "Rach3" with the Oslo Philharmonic by those who assume the right to get familiar with these greats, unfortunately sound-only. And I have to admit that Volodos' version was also good-as-it-gets. And OK, maybe better. Fingers-that-fly (on other videos, trust me). It's like watching Olympic athletes perform at a superhuman level. But what am I supposed to do with those tears from Yunchan's performance, put them back in my head? Who's got it right? I ask myself - the version of me that appreciates exceptional talent, cold-hearted ranking of merit, knock-your-socks-off exceptional performances, or a sit-back-and-let-it-flow-over-you performance?  An interesting, but ultimately trivial debate. You can go one way on one occasion, the other way on another.

There are times, it turns out, when you need to apply nuanced thinking to decide when to use nuanced thinking.  I'm just stumbling around with the obvious here: there are fundamental differences in evaluating the three basic philosophical notions of truth, beauty and justice. With beauty and the evaluation of objects of art or perfomance or skill, seeking nuanced distinctions is little more than a game to play, and is all too often played by snobs and other one-uppers. And with justice, it's more a question of cultural notions of right and wrong. But it's when it comes to questions of truth that there is so much more at stake. Esthetic phenomena invite snobs whose opinions are more about proving one is a superior being or an "insider" than about anything resembling truth. Do I really need others, with greater knowledge of distinctions between "very good" and "very very good" to tell me how to approach an artist and a performance?  It should be obvious that I do not.  But life-and-death matters, including government policies about war and peace and national security, or health and education and who gets to appoint Supreme Court justices, require of all of us that we shed this virus we picked up in the 1960s, the idea that the appropriate response to everything was "Cool!"  Or "Whatever!"

I went along with my husband who wanted to paint our house orange and shock the bejeezus out of our neighbors and stand out like a sore thumb. That's not why we did it; that's just the result. The point is that when it came to choosing between elegance and fun, we decided on the latter.

But when somebody tells me there is no difference between the democratically-oriented Joe Biden and the other guy who refers to his political opponents as vermin, well...