There’s a common conceit in journalism these days that I like to think of as the “I regret to inform you” take.
It goes something like this: “Everybody thinks X. Here’s a bunch of data and charts or science which prove that’s not true.”
Here’s one about how the “myth” of maternal instinct was created by men. And another about the futility of caring about your dietary environmental impact. Usually, the author is a left-of-center person debunking an idea that his or her ideological peers want to be true. If you look hard enough and you’re smart enough, they seem to say, everything is problematic.
I get why these are written. The internet and people who make a living trafficking in its clicks love nothing more than a counterintuitive take. A shocking or head-scratching headline, followed by some kind of rigorous proof, new science, or authoritative source to back it up, is the pulse-quickening stuff that journalists live for. If you leave your readers feeling a little more cynical about the world in the process, even better—that keeps them coming back. I should know, because I used to write stories like this myself.
These days, after more than two years out of the daily journalism grind, I read these things and shrug. Implicit in this line of reasoning is that there is only one way to know things, and that way is facts. Nothing else matters. The data will save you. Science is god. If you quibble this, you’re a dummy. The numbers simply don’t lie!
Take the aforementioned example, where the author posits that all the things people do to lessen the environmental impact of their diet are more or less about optics and superficiality. You read it and feel a kind of sink in your gut. Okay, the world is burning and nothing I seem to do matters. Guess I’ll just … do nothing then?
The crazy thing is, this author wants people to care about the environment! They’ve just made the mistake of thinking that data and facts are the only way people make decisions. And sure, in a disembodied world where nobody takes pleasure in their immediate surroundings or has any physical or spiritual connection to time, place, and earth, then maybe eating your microwaved fake meat substitute out of a plastic container while riding a packed subway home from your fluorescent-lit office job is the best way to care for the environment. But that’s not how humans are built to live, is it?
You can mock the bougie middle class consumer who looks forward to buying late summer squash at the farmers market in September, but what if that weekly ritual of buying food that was grown near where they live, of speaking to the person who grew it‚ of eating in a way that complements the way the seasons are changing around them, of digesting the microbes and nutrients their gut and immune system need at that time of year—what if all that makes them feel something?
What if it spurs them to consider making broader, deeper changes in other areas of their lives, like slowing down or saying no to things that are bad for their spirit—which are usually the same things that are bad for the planet, too. What if it is the thing that starts to make them feel connected once again, to their own body, to their purpose, to their sense of place on the earth.
I’m not saying that a trip to the farmers market is changing the world, but we’re never going to find a more sustainable way forward by shutting off the parts of ourselves that make us fully human. We are not perfect actors choosing our actions based on a known set of variables, inputs, and outcomes. We are messy, wondrous beings, full of complexities, imagination, and instincts we can’t fully explain.
Pregnancy, childbirth, and, of course, parenthood is full of this kind of stuff. Examples where the “data” or “science” is inconclusive or nonexistent, the experts on a given topic are usually trying to sell you something, and the public health guidance seems written by people who have never actually spent a full day with a baby before. And so what do you do? You pay attention to your body, your kid, and how everyone in your household is feeling, and you make the decision that leaves you feeling the most sane and whole. “Trust your instincts” is the most cliche parenting advice because it’s the only advice that’s actually useful.
When we internalize the idea that the only way for sophisticated, intelligent humans to make decisions is based on facts and data alone, we shut off large swathes of ourselves. These parts may defy explanation, logic, and reason as we’ve learned to use them, but they are as integral to who we are—and to how we make decisions and experience the world— as anything else. I really believe that to live without them is to accept a less than human existence.
As botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer said on the “On Being” podcast about her desire to find out why two particular flowers looked so beautiful next to one another.
I came to understand that that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science as a way of knowing explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together.
Of course, science gives us really important things that make the world immeasurably better; I promise you’ll never hear me argue otherwise. To entirely disregard that way of knowing—to say each of us can forge our own version of truth—leaves us with a stew of conspiracy theories and societal breakdown. But I worry about a world where all the most powerful, high-status people with the largest platforms are all forming their ideas, world views, and solutions through this one narrow way of knowing and dismissing everything else as the terrain of unserious cranks.
In fact, I think you can see the limitations of that world all around us. Politicians consider the long-term fiscal impact of their policies, but not the feeling they might inflict on their people. Medicine searches for a treatment that can have a measurable impact on a given condition, but doesn’t address the root causes and interrelated emotional and psychological issues that might actually be making a person very sick. We put faith in the idea that technology and innovation will help us avert a climate emergency and continue our precarious way of life, while ignoring that many of the answers lie not in future innovation, but in ways of doing things we’ve long left behind.
I’ve come to believe that the response to the state of the world today isn’t to cling ever more tightly to our intellect and material facts hoping we can convince everyone else we have the right answers. Rather, it’s to embrace who we are. To cultivate our different ways of knowing and learn how they interplay together—how reason, spirit, instinct, and physicality don’t work against each other, but rather knit together, resulting in an embodied cognition that feels much more sustainable and reassuring. I can speak from experience when I say that much better decisions follow from that framework.
I don’t have any proof that the world would look very different if we all did that, but frankly, I don’t think I need it.
Things I enjoyed reading
“In the annals of human history, there are very few individuals, if any, known to have experienced the depths of solitude that the lone man endured.” [New Yorker]
The predominate way we frame the conversation around about mental illness discounts the structural reasons so many of us are mentally unwell. There is no pill to fix that. [The Guardian]
To be a writer who’s also a mother is to get very good at writing in tiny snippets in odd places, possibly one-handed. [LitHub]
“Today’s news, even high-quality print news, is not designed for humans.” A good explanation of why you’re unable to stomach reading the news. [Washington Post]
What happens when chronic illness shifts from being a mere diagnosis to an online identity? [Common Sense]
Three fun things: Good ideas for when you have a glut of fresh herbs; have fun daydreaming about living in Sienna Miller’s English countryside cottage; and I can’t stop thinking about Joan Didion’s sunglasses bowl.
If you subscribe to a lot of Substack newsletters like this one, I recommend downloading the Substack Reader app. It’s super simple and user-friendly and puts all the things hope to get to reading in one place, rather than languishing in your inbox next to the things you’re purposely ignoring.
Things I enjoyed listening to
“What registers as anxiety is typically no freakish phenomenon. It is our mind’s logical enraged plea not to be continuously and exhaustingly overstimulated.” [The School of Life]
I really enjoyed this interview with the YouTuber Contrapoints, on how she uses her wildly entertaining long-form video essays to transcend the culture war and do the seemingly impossible: change people’s minds on the internet. [Offline]
Having a baby and trying to figure out how to work and be a person has really challenged some of the ideas I ingested about feminism throughout my 20s. Louise Perry puts words to some of my complex and unexpected feelings. [The Unspeakable]
My partner Dan reprised his Mixtape newsletter: A Sunday playlist of ten songs with liner notes. I’m biased, but he’s good at it. Here are the songs we’ve been singing to our son Rafe.
Word Soup
“In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October.”― Alexander Smith
“If you can approach your daily life in this way for a while—as a sequence of momentary, self-contained, eminently doable actions, rather than as an arduous matter of chipping away at enormous challenges—you might notice something profound, which is that, in fact, this is all you ever need to do. ” —Oliver Burkeman
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Ways of knowing
Loved this issue. Exactly what I need on this fine October morning ❤️
I'm fascinated by conversations around epistemologies. Having a background in science I was taught (indoctrinated?) into believe the scientific method was the be all, end all. But working with humans has taught me so much about how we weaponise science to undermine people's lived experience in their bodies. It's tricky because I also know how damaging misinformation can be (especially in the nutrition space). I think it's essential health professionals de-expert themselves and make space for what the other human knows to be true in their bodies, and only share information with consent. Funnily enough I read both of the pieces you linked to here (and bough the book from the first one) and had an instinct that there was something off but couldn't articulate why until I read this so thank you. I wonder if you've read These Wilds Beyond Our Fences by Bayo Akomolafe - he talks about ways of knowing in the context of colonialism, climate colapse and parenting in a way that really challenged my thinking.