The Three Most Powerful Words
The performance artists are the mirrors of our world.
Dr. Céline Gounder is one of the specialists on President-Elect Biden’s Coronavirus Team. In an interview with The New York Times this morning, she has a wide-ranging discussion about what the new administration plans to enact to address the Covid-19 pandemic.
On the subject of the virus and its decimation of populations in rural areas, she gives an answer rarely seen in print or heard on audio in recent memory.
“I have myself worked on Indian reservations in the Southwest, and I know some of my colleagues are really struggling right now. Once things really start to trend up again, they simply don’t have the I.C.U. beds—not just on the reservation, but in any kind of proximity in the state—to transfer people to. And once your hospital capacity gets saturated, case fatality rates shoot up.
“I don’t have a good answer for you right now as to what we can do right away. But it’s definitely on the radar.”
Essentially, she tells the interviewer, “I don’t know.”
These are three of the most powerful words I know.
As I said, these words have rarely if ever appeared in our public discourse in the past few years. Her statement started me wondering why. And what we’ve experienced instead.
Well, foremost, we’ve been served “alternative facts” rather than I don’t knows. As if alternative facts are somehow preferable to not knowing. I guess for some people they are, but not for me.
I’d rather know that whoever is speaking doesn’t know than be told, shall we stretch it a little—or a lot, dubious truths.
It’s these alternative-fact narratives that have landed us in the worst-case scenario for the pandemic this winter. Daily case rates are over 100,000 in the U.S. Death rates tend to surge three weeks later. Uh, happy holidays?
I’m wondering if this spate of false knowing is based in something far more damaging than lack of knowledge. That would be, um, lack of care.
How’s this for a subtext for alternative facts? I don’t care. Hmmm. That resonates, doesn’t it? Ouch.
I learned to say I don’t know during my days as an undergraduate. Those three powerful words were almost always followed by these: But I can find out. If I had to bottom-line my undergraduate education, the two would make a whole sentence.
I don’t know, but I can find out.
That’s really what I learned from four years in the Ivy League. Pretty basic, no?
Oh, I suppose I also learned to write a cogent argument, and to think both laterally and creatively, but the most instantly applicable learning was I don’t know, but I can find out.
Legions are implicit in that sentence. Certainly confidence, but also competence, certainty that whatever it was, I could find out—somehow. Implicit faith in my own ability.
But what happens when it’s not safe to say I don’t know? I think that’s where we’ve been in this country for years. We’ve made a culture in which it’s unsafe not to know.
Bret Stephens wrote his Opinion column this morning on the uniformity, no, the conformity of The Left, on how woker-than-thou has blinded liberal thinkers. It made me think that the Left, no more or less than the Right, aren’t safe to tell We the People that they don’t know.
Isn’t that what the polls and the data and the algorithms are all about? Prognosticating the unknown future. Sure, they are. But they don’t really. All those numbers rackets tell us are where we have been in the past. They don’t even touch the future.
Another article this morning delighted me. Jesse Green, Times theatre critic, writes about how the lines between art and politics are blurring, will continue to blur, and perhaps have something to teach we who pretend to know.
“‘How is it politicians and artists have switched jobs?’
“When Kristina Wong asks that question in her one-woman show ‘Kristina Wong for Public Office,’ streamable through Nov. 29 from the Center Theater Group, she isn’t just referring to the way she, a ‘self-obsessed, kind of naïve’ West Coast performance artist, wound up on a ballot—and winning.
“She’s also trying to understand what it means for performers to take public policy as their script at a time when policymakers seem to be taking public performance as theirs.”
Ohhhhh, I thought, perhaps this Of course I know culture that we have created is a function of simple performance anxiety?
I don’t think so. Not really.
What I really do think is that the boundaries between art and politics are blurring because politics are being exposed—as is so much else—as the artform it is, and not the science of morality it pretends to be.
Of course, public policy is a script for artists.
Creating public policy is an art.
If there are seers in our world today, Beloved, they’re not the number crunchers no matter how much they squawk that they are seers. No, the seers are, and always have been, the performance artists in our world. The performance artists of all genres.
That’s because performance artists are the ones closest to the heartbeat of human behavior. They are students of human behavior and they mirror us back to ourselves.
The most recent occupant of the White House has an allergy to facts, as we all know. Really, an allergy to reality. He can never not know. Neither can his toadies.
But we, Beloved, are made of stronger stuff. We can, if we so choose, celebrate the power inherent in not-knowing. Not-knowing becomes a platform, a diving board, a launch pad for our quest. This is because, when we don’t know, we do know that we can always find out.
If you’re at a loss as to where to start, just look to the performance artists. They will guide us home. They always have.
Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her website is susancorso.com.