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At some point in the pandemic, I stopped believing. I couldn’t have said what I believed in, exactly. The dominant narrative. The ideological rigidity of the left. The medical system. The school system. The system. I just all of a sudden saw it as belief: not “facts.” Not “science,” as in “like magic but real,” as one bumper sticker read; not “the way things are” or “the way things should be,” an unquestionable and given understanding of right/wrong, true/false, good/bad.
In a dissertation on free birth by the English professor Rixa Ann Spencer Freeze, I came across a quote from the anthropologist Brigitte Jordan, who studied birth across four cultures: indigenous Mayan births with traditional birth attendants, Swedish and Dutch births with midwives, and U.S. hospital birth. Jordan wrote that there was no such thing as authoritative knowledge, or, in other words, scientific “truth” about birth.
Rather, authoritative knowledge could be considered “the knowledge that within a community is considered legitimate, consequential, official, worthy of discussion, and appropriate.” It is a “state that is collaboratively achieved within a community of practice.”
As Freeze explains, “Whether or not the knowledge system is ‘right’ or ‘truthful’ is irrelevant; ‘the power of authoritative knowledge is not that it is correct but that it counts.’
Not that it is correct, but that it counts.
How many of us have felt hemmed in, trapped, by the ideological and epistemic camp in which we find ourselves, its boundaries of acceptable discourse, thought, and story growing ever narrower and narrower?
How many of us have lost the plot, wondering what is true, what is conspiracy, what is truly radical, what is radically dogmatic? Whether or not what counts – what is allowable, given, regurgitated not as belief but as fact everywhere we look within our respective bubbles – is actually correct?
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