Is it just older people who begin most of their conversation starters with, “What I don’t understand is…”?
You can complete the sentence with your favourite bugbear: “…why people think it’s OK to drop litter all over the place…”, “why they’re building a new housing estate on land that’s known for flooding…”, “…why they can’t fill in those potholes at the same time they do the others across the road…”, “why they’re still digging coal and drilling for oil at a time of environmental catastrophe…”, “… why they don’t just send the illegal immigrants back to where they came from…”, “…why people just can’t live together in peace…”, and so on.
The implication is, that you (and perhaps the people you’re in conversation with) are the only ones who DO understand. Everyone else, usually an unspecified ‘they’ or ‘people’, is, of course, a complete idiot. A fool. Or worse, a lazy fool. Or even worse, a big orange man-baby fool.
What is actually going on here? Perhaps it’s a boast about something that the speaker has noticed that few others have. Perhaps it’s an attempt to draw attention to a serious flaw in the fabric of society. Or human nature. Or perhaps a genuine plea for enlightenment. Or perhaps it is a confession: “I myself have now become a stupid person. The world has passed me by. Things ain’t what they used to be.”
When you next hear that confession, or are tempted to use it yourself, try substituting an alternative phrase, ‘What I can’t be bothered to think about the reasons for is…” Because when people use the phrase “What I don’t understand is…” are they not really admitting that they haven’t really thought through the possible reasons for why something is as it is? The phrase often covers up an unwillingness to think about reasons. Which may be all very well in the context of casual conversations, but actually reveals something problematic in the way that we relate to the ‘faceless bureaucrats’ or ‘politicians’ whom we believe responsible for the woes of the world.
But here’s the thing, (and, yes, I don’t understand why everyone is suddenly using that phrase), we can probably hazard a pretty good guess at the reasons why things are as they are. As Lawrie Taylor used to say about the causes of crime, “they are well known, but complex”. Any old AI robot can give you list of the possible reasons why people commit crimes, but not the subtlety of how those causes interact in often complex ways. Is it this complexity that we don’t really want to engage with?
This is where real learning begins, does it not? And some things are truly hard to understand, particularly when traditional belief systems, and one’s personal identity, are at stake.
Don Cupitt’s classic 1984 book, The Sea of Faith: Christianity in Change, begins, ‘For those caught up in it, a time of religious upheaval is peculiarly hard to understand. People’s deepest convictions, their philosophy of life and their form of religious consciousness are all in turmoil. All seems darkness, confusion and a Babel of conflicting voices. Only with hindsight, after the dust has settled, will it be possible to see clearly what are the gains, the losses – and also, the unexpected continuities’ (p.7).
So things that used to seem obvious, that is, ‘easy to see’, may no longer be so. The old dualities of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong, of heaven and earth, of spirit and matter, have been dissolved in these modern times. For us in the Sea of Faith, it may have become obvious that scientific answers to many of life’s mysteries are better than those that refer to spirit-powers from beyond, but this does not mean giving up on the whole of religion. Or even on the whole of the realm of the mysterious.
When one man survived, in Seat 11A, the horrendous 12th June Air India crash in Ahmedabad, the experts were quick to weigh in. This may have been called a ‘miracle’ in the newspapers, but was explicable by the extraordinary good fortune of a series of factors: a hole in the fuselage being torn in the plane right next to the man’s seat, which was probably “in a strong part of the airplane at the front edge of the wing.” And having survived the impact, the man, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, also had the awareness to unbuckle himself and limp out onto the building the plane had crashed into before it was engulfed in a fireball. But why him?
Why not him? we can reply. But somehow that’s not an entirely satisfactory explanation. That’s something I doubt anyone, perhaps especially Ramesh himself, can ever really understand.