“I’m not surprised, but….” “It is hardly unexpected that this has happened, but….” I trust that such formulations are familiar, as is what follows: a negative judgment, ranging from mild disappointment to outraged moral condemnation. “I’m not surprised, but saddened,” a Jewish leader said in response to Trump’s refusal to denounce white supremacists. “I’m not surprised, but we can never allow this to become normal,” responded Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono after Trump shared anti-Muslim tweets.
“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Henry James wrote. What might be good advice for an aesthete fostering a discriminating attitude of aloofly detached understanding, might not be good advice for someone trying to act ethically or inspire political activism. In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty described what he called knowingness as having overtaken philosophy and literary studies: “Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.”
The knowing, cynical mindset that the (terrible) way things are trending is what we expected all along is endemic to our times, and it has a deleterious effect on the force of moral judgment. The increasingly common phrase “I’m not surprised, but this is bad” conjoins two modalities, the first descriptive and grounded in what one expected, the second normative and expressing one’s judgment about what should have happened. A knowing lack of surprise, which positions the speaker as savvy, weakens the moral judgment that follows. If what happened was expected, then the sense that something else could have, and so the weight of disapproval, is undercut.
A knowing glance, look, wink, smirk: the knowing person both sees and makes sure that they are seen as seeing. They are in the know, in on any joke. Knowingness does not necessarily entail knowledge, however, just as Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” does not necessarily entail truth. What is knowingly believed is often false, even more often unearned. Knowingness is essentially a mindset of (subjective) certainty, based not on proof or even the strength of evidence, but preceding experience, such that new evidence cannot overturn the larger preexisting view, only be appropriately incorporated.
Rorty wrote of art that “If it is to have inspirational value, a work must be allowed to recontextualize much of what you previously thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what you already believe.” The problem with a knowing mindset is that it mis-orders interpretation in time: one already knows what conclusion to draw. Since a work of art cannot challenge it, one doesn’t really need to attend to it. Our attention to any experience and evidence, not just art, can be precluded by a knowing mindset.
In his Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk described cynicism as “the universally widespread way in which enlightened people see to it that they are not taken for suckers.” The literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick described how the paranoid mindset is self-protective. Avoiding surprise “requires that bad news be always already known.” One judges that it is wrong, but also knows that it will happen anyway. Insofar as one’s predictive certainty is stronger than one’s moral judgment, one can’t muster the hope that the right thing will happen, but is protected from looking naive. So if one is worried about saving face, it is better to stress the prediction rather than the rightness of one’s judgment—and the value of fighting for it. One knows that teaching at an elite university only perpetuates American plutocracy. One knows that limiting one’s personal carbon footprint accomplishes nothing. But so would quitting. The question of what to do is supplanted by self-protective cynicism.
One already knows that one’s political opponent is disappointing, even morally abhorrent; their latest behavior only reinforces this judgment. Such a mindset inhibits one from examining if the latest turn of events really does mean what one assumed beforehand. This would seem no small problem for the possibility of civil (in both senses of the word) discourse. “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints,” James wrote. The same might be said of politics.
Suppose that one is certain of the rightness of one’s ethical and political beliefs, unconcerned about foreclosing the possibility of learning something new from, say, Trump’s latest statement. Still, even in a mindset of righteous certainty, it seems to me that a knowing lack of surprise weakens the moral judgment that follows it. At an extreme—of course he did that, obviously that was going to happen—it is implied that nothing else could have, and thus the “can” necessary for the “ought” of one’s moral judgment to have weight is missing. But even short of such an extreme, a belief in the mere likelihood that one’s political opponent couldn’t have acted otherwise is enough to lessen the force of the claim that they should have.
Progressives decry Trump’s policies and personal behavior, but often only after noting they weren’t among the unwitting who hadn’t foreseen them. Even the refrain “This is not normal” falls prey to the same mindset. This “normal” is a descriptive one, of what usually happens (its antonym is “unusual”), more than it is a normative one, of what should happen (where the antonym is a loaded “abnormal,” or even “deviant”). “This is not normal” reminds us that Presidents don’t usually act this way, suggesting that we should resist such behavior not so much as wrong, but rather unprecedented. “This is unusual, yet I am not surprised by it” is the not-quite-contradictory, yet still rather tense mindset many progressives have spent recent years occupying. If not delusional (I didn’t actually predict this turn of events, but in retrospect I will act as if I could have), it is at least self-aggrandizing, positioning one as possessing insider knowledge, special savvy, or clarity of judgment.
This pattern is exemplified by political pundits who debate only the chances of a given candidate’s or bill’s success—a pattern that seems ever more prevalent, facilitated both by a journalistic mindset that thinks its ambit is purely descriptive, and also a data-driven approach that is categorically unable to address normative concerns. Knowingness is part of a decadent culture of political discourse, in which we trade cynical, snarky meta-commentary rather than ever engaging in substantive conversation about how to improve society. Demagogues prey on our least productive feelings, whereas those who would style themselves alternatives through idealism too often invoke it only airily. Anyone helping us to expand our imagination of possibilities, and concretely realize them, is rare.
Excerpted from “‘I’m Not Surprised, But…’: Knowingness and Moral Judgment,” in Philosophy and Rhetoric 57.4. Reprinted with permission of the editor.
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