Brilliant and stimulating, as always. The leitmotif seems to be "without illusion of permanency." And this "habit" of writing in medias res which you describe (to paraphrase) as thrusting plunging engaging and capturing your readers... making us scramble, reminds me of the method Chogyam Trungpa employed bringing Vajrayana Buddhism to the West, wanting us to be as surprised as if a pancake fell out of the sky onto our heads. I am particularly struck by your breakdown of the three paths often taken when clinging to a model of reality (or a tightrope with no secured end.) I find parallels to Trungpa's interpretation of the Skandhas or Heaps of Ignorance one must avoid in order to find liberation. Diligence is required to stay focused and present. "Lose concentration for a second and you plunge into the void." To me, in medias res requires that we look at our subject and at ourselves directly-without any reference point at all. Good stuff. Thank you.
I have always understood in medias re as a literary convention. Reading your explanation of the concept as applied to contemporary problems was an eye opener and helped me add another plank to my understanding of why our government is so often so ineffectual. It seems our leaders are always focusing on the next crisis, without adequately understanding and devising plans to deal with the current one. And, when the next crisis emerges, they forget about the prior one and largely abandon any effort to ameliorate that problem should it arise again. If I recall correctly, in Shutdown you describe this as always preparing, but never actually being prepared. Always attempting to put out the current fire, but utterly failing to take reasonable fire prevention action.
Also, your discussion of the three tendencies that cause us to avoid looking fully at - fully living in - a current crisis helped me understand how we are mired in a perpetual shell game - and, of course, a shell game is a short con. It seems our leaders "trick" us into looking at anything except the pea, hiding it under one of the three distractions you describe.
Re the first and third distractions - focusing on something similar in the past and treating the present as just a way station to our next destination, all the sudden interest in the Spanish Flu pandemic seemed to be used to say, "Hey, we survived that one and nothing much was different after that virus became endemic" - which I found appalling, especially the "nothing changed" bit that promised this would all be over soon enough and we could all go back to "normal" as though nothing had happened, thus priming us to be unprepared yet again.
Re the second distraction - focusing on something even bigger, the murder of George Floyd and the attendant social justice protests/riots immediately changed the narrative. The media whiplashed from 24/7 coverage of the pandemic and Trump's abysmal response to "defund the police" yada yada yada. Perhaps the most awful aspect of this was the left's whiplash from being all nanny-state re public health diktats to arguing that protesting police brutality justified not enforcing social-distancing recommendations. I realize that this example doesn't meet your "hypothetical" criterion, but for most of our non-minority population, police brutality is not our lived experience.
Anyway, that's my inflated two-cents FWIW: not being a world-renowned thinker such as you ;) I may have misinterpreted your meaning. In any event, you made me think, which is always a welcome invitation to continue my life-long journey attempting to understand the "something" that is "happening here" - especially when "what it is ain't exactly clear." [h/t Buffalo Springfield https://youtu.be/80_39eAx3z8 ]
This was an excellent analysis of both of our current moment of peril in the US, and the refusal on both sides to acknowledge that problems ignored are not crises averted. The new normal is grim, but a worse fate could be deterred. But it won't be...fear is leading, not to action, but to various manifestations of collective delusion, from billionaires trying to escape to other planets to the middle class trying to overthrow the government to a political party pretending that forcibly stripping away civil rights will return our world to an imaginary peaceful past. We can document the insanity and predict the most likely futures, but I see no evidence that larger structural changes will occur. Instead, the more dramatic the objective reality, the stronger the delusions will become.
Much to appreciate here; thank you. Regarding the opening focus on `in media res`:
What I am, however, suspicious of is the facile assumption that we know what the structural realities are that define a situation, whether it be World War I or COVID. To my mind, it is only when you take the difficulty of thinking in medias res seriously, only if you are willing to experiment with different definitions and to probe your assumptions, that you actually are wrestling with the complexity of history and our determination by “structural realities”.
... can we say that you prefer inductive to deductive cognition? I find this preference is one the most articulate, meta-cognition-fluent analysts struggle to account for in their affinity for apparent intellectual opponents and their conflict with apparent intellectual allies. Some of us reason up from messy facts and are comfortable with the fragile contingency of the extracted conclusions. Others equip themselves with ideas, with which they process each situation as they encounter it. Deluge is both an example of the former—the wonderful opening chapters that taught me so much about the, again, contingent course of history from 1916 through 1920—and an indictment of the latter—the tragedy of actors, notably Wilson, captured by the wrong ideals.
Chartbook on Shutdown #2: Writing in medias res
Many congratulations on the upcoming publication! Preordered!
Brilliant and stimulating, as always. The leitmotif seems to be "without illusion of permanency." And this "habit" of writing in medias res which you describe (to paraphrase) as thrusting plunging engaging and capturing your readers... making us scramble, reminds me of the method Chogyam Trungpa employed bringing Vajrayana Buddhism to the West, wanting us to be as surprised as if a pancake fell out of the sky onto our heads. I am particularly struck by your breakdown of the three paths often taken when clinging to a model of reality (or a tightrope with no secured end.) I find parallels to Trungpa's interpretation of the Skandhas or Heaps of Ignorance one must avoid in order to find liberation. Diligence is required to stay focused and present. "Lose concentration for a second and you plunge into the void." To me, in medias res requires that we look at our subject and at ourselves directly-without any reference point at all. Good stuff. Thank you.
I have always understood in medias re as a literary convention. Reading your explanation of the concept as applied to contemporary problems was an eye opener and helped me add another plank to my understanding of why our government is so often so ineffectual. It seems our leaders are always focusing on the next crisis, without adequately understanding and devising plans to deal with the current one. And, when the next crisis emerges, they forget about the prior one and largely abandon any effort to ameliorate that problem should it arise again. If I recall correctly, in Shutdown you describe this as always preparing, but never actually being prepared. Always attempting to put out the current fire, but utterly failing to take reasonable fire prevention action.
Also, your discussion of the three tendencies that cause us to avoid looking fully at - fully living in - a current crisis helped me understand how we are mired in a perpetual shell game - and, of course, a shell game is a short con. It seems our leaders "trick" us into looking at anything except the pea, hiding it under one of the three distractions you describe.
Re the first and third distractions - focusing on something similar in the past and treating the present as just a way station to our next destination, all the sudden interest in the Spanish Flu pandemic seemed to be used to say, "Hey, we survived that one and nothing much was different after that virus became endemic" - which I found appalling, especially the "nothing changed" bit that promised this would all be over soon enough and we could all go back to "normal" as though nothing had happened, thus priming us to be unprepared yet again.
Re the second distraction - focusing on something even bigger, the murder of George Floyd and the attendant social justice protests/riots immediately changed the narrative. The media whiplashed from 24/7 coverage of the pandemic and Trump's abysmal response to "defund the police" yada yada yada. Perhaps the most awful aspect of this was the left's whiplash from being all nanny-state re public health diktats to arguing that protesting police brutality justified not enforcing social-distancing recommendations. I realize that this example doesn't meet your "hypothetical" criterion, but for most of our non-minority population, police brutality is not our lived experience.
Anyway, that's my inflated two-cents FWIW: not being a world-renowned thinker such as you ;) I may have misinterpreted your meaning. In any event, you made me think, which is always a welcome invitation to continue my life-long journey attempting to understand the "something" that is "happening here" - especially when "what it is ain't exactly clear." [h/t Buffalo Springfield https://youtu.be/80_39eAx3z8 ]
This was an excellent analysis of both of our current moment of peril in the US, and the refusal on both sides to acknowledge that problems ignored are not crises averted. The new normal is grim, but a worse fate could be deterred. But it won't be...fear is leading, not to action, but to various manifestations of collective delusion, from billionaires trying to escape to other planets to the middle class trying to overthrow the government to a political party pretending that forcibly stripping away civil rights will return our world to an imaginary peaceful past. We can document the insanity and predict the most likely futures, but I see no evidence that larger structural changes will occur. Instead, the more dramatic the objective reality, the stronger the delusions will become.
I mean, Herodotus wrote in medias res it's important work to make a record, as well
Much to appreciate here; thank you. Regarding the opening focus on `in media res`:
What I am, however, suspicious of is the facile assumption that we know what the structural realities are that define a situation, whether it be World War I or COVID. To my mind, it is only when you take the difficulty of thinking in medias res seriously, only if you are willing to experiment with different definitions and to probe your assumptions, that you actually are wrestling with the complexity of history and our determination by “structural realities”.
... can we say that you prefer inductive to deductive cognition? I find this preference is one the most articulate, meta-cognition-fluent analysts struggle to account for in their affinity for apparent intellectual opponents and their conflict with apparent intellectual allies. Some of us reason up from messy facts and are comfortable with the fragile contingency of the extracted conclusions. Others equip themselves with ideas, with which they process each situation as they encounter it. Deluge is both an example of the former—the wonderful opening chapters that taught me so much about the, again, contingent course of history from 1916 through 1920—and an indictment of the latter—the tragedy of actors, notably Wilson, captured by the wrong ideals.