A political postscript to the ambiguphobia piece.
The earlier piece stayed mostly on the ethical and anthropological level — ambiguphobia as the inability to bear more than one valid reading of a situation, perspectival hospitality as its counter-word, the grammar of host and guest. The political dimension was in the room the whole time, but I let it stay implicit.
It should not have. What Adler called Gemeinschaftsgefühl — community feeling — has an epistemic form as well as a social one. To bear ambiguity is always also a feat of social imagination. You have to be able to imagine that the other person sees the world differently — not merely in error, not merely offering a weaker version of your own position, but carrying an access to the world that has its own standing and is not simply addable to yours.
That is, right now, our principal political problem. And it is worth saying plainly why.
What has changed in the last ten or fifteen years is not that people disagree with each other. People have always disagreed. What has changed is that each side now denies the other access to reality itself. Not "you see it wrongly" but "you don't see it at all." Not error, but derangement, or corruption, or malice.
That is the failure of social imagination in its pure form. And it is mutual. The liberal center looks at the right-wing voter and sees someone radicalized, manipulated, or structurally racist. The right-wing voter looks at the liberal center and sees contempt for her life, her town, her sense of what is normal. Each side has lost the ability to imagine that the other arrives at her position for reasons — reasons anchored in a particular life that runs differently from their own.
This is not a call for centrism or for false equivalence. It matters very much what people think and what positions they hold. But it matters differently once you grant that the other side has reasons. Then you can argue. Without that grant, you can only denounce.
A good friend of mine has voted SPD all his life. He lives in St. Georg, a central district of Hamburg — lively, mixed, long a showcase of urban tolerance and also, for years now, one of the city's harder neighborhoods. Drug scene, street violence, shifts in who walks the streets at what hour. Last year he told me he had started voting differently. Not because he had moved to the right, he said. Because what he saw on his own doorstep no longer had a place in the political language of the party he had belonged to all his life. When he described his daily experience to friends elsewhere, they looked at him as if he had said something embarrassing. He said he felt not disagreed with, but disappeared.
I do not have to share his conclusions to register what happened to him. He has a real experience in a real place, and the political culture he had belonged to all his life could no longer imagine it. So he went looking — reluctantly, unhappily — for a political voice that would at least admit that his experience existed.
The mirror case is just as common. The migrant who has lived in Germany for twenty years, speaks the language better than half the born-Germans around her, pays her taxes, and now reads in every second headline that people like her are the problem. She is not imagined either. She is a statistic, a threat category, an abstraction.
In both cases the ambiguphobia is the same. The refusal to let a complicated reality be complicated. The insistence on a single clean reading. And in both cases, what is lost is the ability to ask: what would I see from where she stands?
The same pattern elsewhere. The climate activist — young, educated, mostly urban — sees the commuter who opposes a driving ban as selfish, short-sighted, in denial about the catastrophe. The commuter — fifty, small-town, not quite making it to the end of the month — sees the activist as someone who has never worried about filling a tank, whose moral certainty is paid for by parents or grants.
Both are right about parts of the other's life. Both are wrong to treat those parts as the whole. The activist does not imagine that resistance to climate policy can come from a real and non-malicious place. The commuter does not imagine that climate panic can come from a real and non-hysterical place. Neither imagines the other as someone with her own access to the world.