Hope in Ambiguity
So
much of what challenges us in life is a perpetual decline in absolutes. Often
the more we know, the less sure we become
Years
ago, I had a sagacious colleague who regularly told his students that the ideal
outcome of a liberal education was a rich awareness of how little each of us
really knows.
As a
musician, I had a realization around the time I turned 30 that I was finally
hearing the way my teachers had. To a small extent is was a matter of enhanced technique
from sustained practice, but to a much greater degree, it having heard enough
to have amassed a capacity of context. I had listened with intention to enough
music to begin hearing compositional architecture in a meaningful way.
As
that capacity grew, my awareness of the music I had yet to hear grew
exponentially faster. New unknown pieces became progressively easier understand
and appreciate.
What
a remarkable privilege each of us has when we are asked to consider the
imponderable. We have the opportunity to face an infinite natural world and
nearly boundless realms of human achievement, good and bad, and we are
challenged to identify our place in that limitless expanse.
We
must come to terms with the ambiguities that define human existence. For many
the result is helplessness, or worse hopelessness. Charting a course in a world
of uncertainty requires a leap of faith.
As
Francis Bacon wrote: “If a man
will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”[1]
A liberal
arts education bolsters the faith required to make bold leaps. It prepares us to
understand and appreciate the unknown and to use what we do know as polestars to
navigate the void.
Monday evening, we had the great privilege of hosting Mary Robinson, former
president of Ireland, as this year’s Pope Shade Lecturer at Susquehanna University.
She spoke about how her religious faith has guided her life of service in the
law, then government, then human rights, and now as an advocate to stem climate
change.
Our failure to adequately respond to the climate crisis is the
result of business and world leaders ignoring long-term consequences for
short-term gains against a backdrop of helplessness borne from the seemingly
infinite scale of the problem.
If only, more of our leaders would develop the compassion and
intellectual heroism necessary to embrace the bold changes needed to navigate
the abyss of the conspiring environmental conditions we have created.
President Robinson pointed out that the early effects of
climate change are most manifest in the regions of the world least responsible for
creating them. These same regions are least empowered to effect the scale of reform
required to prevent a cataclysmic future.
Many Inuit communities and island nations find their ways of
life and even the persistence of their literal places in the world under
immediate threat.
As
William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it's just not evenly
distributed.”[2]
These
communities are the canaries in the collective coal mine that is Mother Earth.
There
is much we do not know, but we do know the irrefutable scientific work that
exposed and explained the problem of anthropogenic climate change. We need to
muster the ethical courage to use the knowledge we do have to guide us as we charge
into the void to avert the tragic future currently in our view.
There
is no time for hesitation. We must hold tight to what we know and zealously embrace
the ambiguity that surrounds it. Right now, that is where our best hope
resides.