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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2024
As actress Gal Gadot found out to her cost in assuming that “we’re all in this together” during her preamble to the widely ridiculed celebrity rendition of John Lennon's “Imagine” in the early days of the global pandemic, there is a certain recklessness in harbouring any great ambitions for the first-person plural.
In asking, “What Is We?” in her 2020 essay for The Philosopher, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan captures the tension that lies at the heart of any assumption of shared subjectivity, perspective, or experience. More conventional forms of that question, such as “who are we?” or “what are we?” take it for granted that “we” already are. Srinivasan, however, is not convinced.
It is a commonplace that universalisms exclude. The pseudouniversalisms that shape the modern world blur the interests of the powerful with the interests of all. The ever-expanding call for rights and recognition from the excluded is at the same time a call to keep the universalist promise. But what if modernity is in fact constituted by its exclusions? Where are we to go from here?
The felt absence of a common world in our time of radical upheaval has led to interpersonal and political deadlock. The twin crises of Covid-19 and anthropogenic climate change have not served to collectivize us; rather, they have served to amplify the staggering differentials of power and advantage that could more easily be papered over in normal times.
Amidst all this, can we cultivate an art of living together, however provisional and unstable? There is no art of polarization, to be sure (just look at Twitter). Rather, the art of living together involves reaching out across ever-expanding categories of difference – human, non-human, vegetal, robotic, earthly. And despite emerging narratives of relationality and interdependence from feminism to physics, nothing feels harder. The cocoon-like embrace of our echo chamber feels terribly attractive when faced with “them” in all their strange, inscrutable otherness.
Polarization is easy, but, to quote Spinoza, “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”.
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