Field Report: Intellectual Nonsense As Confidence Booster
In which we find respected thinkers actively not giving a f*** about families, and I am cured of both imposter syndrome and FOMO.
I heard about this event a couple weeks ago. At an institute I’d never heard of, here in Berlin. The website said it would be a debate, in English, about rethinking home in a time of large-scale migration, comprised of a panel of intellectuals who “think beyond the conventional definitions of belonging, citizenship, and land ownership”. I’ve lived most of my life very far from the state I am from, and I’ve been trying for many years to grapple seriously with ideas around home and belonging. And tickets were free. So I decided to go check it out. And I’m so glad I did. Because it was a bit ridiculous. And surprisingly liberating.
I think the problem was that no one on stage seemed to know what the event was actually about. Or perhaps, each of them had a clear idea, but they were all different. Certainly, it was not a debate. The German moderator kept things very orderly. She asked specific questions to each of the three panelists, and at no point did those answers have the chance to develop into dynamic conversation, let alone argument.
She started by asking each of the panelists to describe what home meant to them. The first gave a long answer about Rome, and how it thrived because it was an open city that anyone could move to and become a citizen of. The second spoke about living in exile from her home country, and friends, and feelings. The third mostly spoke about the English village he grew up in, and being the son of immigrants.
Lots of very intelligent things were said in the course of the following hour. I took notes. But as far as I can see in those notes, or otherwise recall, there were no particular thoughts on what might be done around issues of housing, education, language barriers, infrastructure, visa and citizenship processes, or religious and philosophical contention. All of which I know to be amongst the urgent concerns in cities growing and changing the way Berlin is, where almost a quarter of us here are not native to Germany, and nearly all the newcomers are citizens of elsewhere.
Nobody spoke about the specific things that make a person’s home life joyful and meaningful, like animals, songs, or meals. And children seemed not to exist at all, except as something that one of them admitted he’d once been (I Googled the guy and apparently he has two sons, but they apparently didn’t factor into his answer of what home means to him).
When the moderator asked the audience for questions, three female fellows of the institution were called on in a row, and two of the three asked questions about family and home. The first question was from a woman who claimed that the whole project of feminism had been to point out that the home was not a good place for women, and to free them from it. The second was a woman who just asked them to address the subject of family in general. And you know what? The only direct answer to either of them came from the woman at the centre of the panel, who’s entire take on the subject of family was to dismiss it with a remark that family was not something that anybody she knew seemed to miss much.
What the actual fuck.
If you’re going to have a panel about the inadequacies of the nation-states in the face of global crises, then do that. That would be a very useful conversation. If you’re going to have a discussion about how cities comprised of ever greater numbers of non-natives are going to maintain coherence in an era of mass migration, then to that. That would also be a very useful conversation. But if you’re going to have a discussion about home and what it means in increasingly unrooted circumstances, then bloody well do that. Have at least one person who has actually thought about and cares about home and the ways we make it, rather than fixating only on the loss of it. Maybe even try inviting someone whose body has been the home of another human being, and has flesh and blood and literal skin in the game of the future of humanity. Who knows that building home is a messy battle, but wades knee-deep into it all the same, every day. Rather than someone being paid to sit on stage in immaculate white trousers and spout pure nonsense about family being irrelevant to our home lives, along with other abstract, despairing statements, like that climate change is going to be so bad, there might not be any point trying to create anything new anyhow. As though giving up on our future generations is an option.
I have an absolute mortal terror of raising my voice in a large room. But after witnessing such a ludicrous, wilful failure to engage with the subject of family, I made myself raise my hand. The moderator looked at me and said, I see you, but we’re out of time. As though the wine and puff pastry waiting in the next room was of greater importance than the discussion, and couldn’t wait two minutes. Oh well. Perhaps I would have been so nervous, I wouldn’t have asked a question properly anyhow. Or perhaps, having already refused to take up the subject of family, they would have done so again, and my tortuous asking would have been in vain.
Don’t get me wrong, the event wasn’t completely dreadful. But it also wasn’t very good. And that mediocrity has had a surprising effect on me. I left the event feeling lighter than when I’d arrived. Really, I felt buoyed along and cheerful the whole way home. And the feeling persisted the next day. And the next. It felt a bit like recovering from a bad cold, and realising your energy and sense of smell have bounced back. Only in this case, it wasn’t germs I’d been inoculate against, but the twin ills of imposter syndrome and fear of missing out. Which have plagued me for some time.
I have spent a lot of the years since grad school feeling like I’ve been in a kind of exile from the ‘successful’ life I was ‘supposed’ to have. I even spent a chunk of time at the start of this year researching graduate degrees in economics; ostensibly because I never studied economics, and now find myself wishing that I had an in-depth understanding of the field to write about Mama Nomics suitably. That really would be nice. But I know perfectly well that a lot of what I was taught at the LSE was bollocks, and that it would have been far more sensible to splurge a few hundred dollars on books than to take out twenty grand in student loans. Why on earth would I go looking to sign up for another spin on that same ride?
The answer is easy: ego. The lack of it. I feel unqualified to weigh in on the vast socio-economic matters that need changing. I do not have an expert’s profound grasp of the history and lingo and names that comprise the discipline I wish to tear apart and rebuild from the ground up. And at the same time, going back to school would be a way to stop being an outsider and a nobody, and get back into ‘the system’; a way to hang out with people with fancy credentials, in fancy buildings, who use fancy words, and host events with fancy snacks.
What this event gave me was a taster of what I have felt I was missing out on. And it’s not very much, actually. I mean, it was fine. It was an excuse to get out of the house and talk to some new people (who also expressed surprise at the lack of coherence on stage). But nothing about it was worth missing my son’s bedtime for. It seems that I know, and definitely care, far more about the subject of home than anyone on that stage. I’m sure they know and care loads more about other subjects, but not about the one that matters, as far as I am concerned, most in the whole world. I’ve felt similarly surprised at the mistakenness of people I’ve heard talking on podcasts many times. But somehow, witnessing it live had a stronger effect. Instead of worrying if my ideas are good enough, I now feel confident that they are at least as good as or better than many of the ones being pedalled as ‘expert’. In fact, it feels urgent that I do add mine to the conversation, by any means available to me.
So I intend to do exactly that. Starting… now.
I know what home is. It has six components, all orbiting our core sentience in concentric circles, at all times, like planets around the sun. I worked it all out while I was pregnant, six years ago; when I suddenly understood that I was and would forever be a foundational force in another human being’s sense of home, and took on that responsibility seriously. Some of my ideas on home have of course fed into the Mama stuff I write here. But mostly, they form an anxious-making backlog of notes and drafts around my desk. Even my basic theory of home has never made it off my hard drive after all this time. I want to begin rectifying that, starting with my next post. Which will follow shortly.
In the meantime: have you had a similar experience? Some incident, possibly quite small, that shifted your attitude or understand or life choices in an outsized way? And has that change stayed with you? Those moments are so interesting - you never know where they’ll pop up. And I’d love to hear where others have found them.