The Risk of Answers
-Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director
I’m thinking about answers today, the promise and the risk of answers.
Questions beg answers, of course, some quite straightforward. Consider the woodshed I built some years ago; is it leaning a little downhill? The straightforward answer is yes – no matter how you look at it, that woodshed is most definitely leaning.
The next question is whether to do anything about that. Not at all, one neighbor says, it’s charming that way. Definitely, says another, you’ll be lucky if you get through the winter.
And if I decide to do something, then what? Brace it? Rebuild? And if I rebuild, then what design will best mitigate the slope of the hill? And how big to build it; how much firewood will we need, how will our family change, how will the climate?
That straightforward answer got complex fast. And the question had only to do with a lopsided shed.
And the answers depended a lot on subjective things, like what is the nature of charming, and how will our family change? The promise of whatever answer I come up with is that we’ll get a sturdier shelter for our winter’s wood. The risk is that we’ll lose some charm, or build in a way that won’t actually beat the slope of the hill, and we’ll have to do it all over again.
The same is true for answers to questions far more complex. Does systemic racism exist? I say yes. Does white supremacy? Again I say yes. How to define them? How to respond? Those answers might be as unsteady as my lopsided woodshed, which I will now confess I set not on a leveled foundation, but big stones of various shapes, and those have shifted over time.
Given what I knew about building, and what I didn’t know about shifting ground or building on even the slightest of slopes, I thought those stones would do. I was wrong.
Too often in history people in power, no matter their politics, have demanded allegiance to answers built on ideas they believe in as much as I believed in those stones. They might be right, and their answers may deliver what they promise, but they are just as likely wrong, or they were right at the time but like the ground under my woodshed, things changed. Still, many have died simply for questioning somebody’s idea of a solid stone.
It would seem, on the face of it, that the Institute for Liberatory Innovation is in the business of finding answers. But really, we’re in the business of what ILI advisor Elizabeth Minnich has called troubling. “In truth,” she has said, “ it is not answers in which I place trust, for which I hope: it is the spirit of troubling” (source). Troubling is stirring things up, and the willingness to wade in the mess that results. Troubling requires humility, the discipline to say, this is just one possible answer; will you think with me about it?
Thinking together is a powerful way to mitigate the risk of answers. Dr. Minnich has also said, “the more we hear from each other as we’re thinking, the richer, the less closed, the more complex, the more subtle, the more in touch with the world we share we’ll be”.
This is why the mission of the ILI is to create opportunities not just to think, experiment and learn, but to do that together. In that way we can stay in touch with the world we share, and the strategies we generate from that will, we hope, be sturdier for it.