The Tailor

 

There is an old joke about a tailor from New York who manages to get an audience with the pope. He comes home and his family gathers round, asking what the pope is like. The tailor replies, “He’s a 40-regular.” 

            The above is quoted from a review by Robert Kuttner in the September 24, 2020, New York Review (pp. 71-74) of a new book by the economist Branko Milanovic. Kuttner uses it to illuminate what he feels are the shortcomings of Milanovic’s correct-as-far-as-it-goes definition of citizenship as “a joint monopoly exercised by a group of people who share a given legal or political characteristic that gives rise to the citizenship rent.” 

            I find the joke hilarious, perhaps in part because it is applicable to all of us. We are all tailors. We all see things from our own necessarily limited perspective. However, there is still a crucial distinction between two kinds of tailors: those who know (or believe), and those who don’t know (or believe), that they are tailors. 

            In broadest brush, to be a tailor means to have a worldview. And for a person with a worldview, everything has a specific meaning and everything is either true or false. This sartorial attitude I call moralism (in a broad sense). In effect each of us has a theory of everything, where every concept has a univocal analysis underlying every claim's being either true or false. 

            But once one recognizes that the meanings and truths of the world are all contingent on a worldview, and even more specifically, that whatever a person him- or herself takes to be the meaning or the truth of something is constrained in this way, startling possibilities, which may be hopeful or dismaying, open up. I call this recognition amoralism. Amoralism resists moralism’s depriving reality of its wealth of meanings and truths. It makes me realize, for example, how I've been hoodwinked by physics into accepting such claims as that black holes have only three qualities: mass, electric charge, and spin. But now I am totally open to there being tables and trees as well as atoms and the void, minds as well as bodies, and so on ad inf. It just depends on which set or sets of concepts and beliefs, however compartmentalized and at seeming odds with one another, are viable, i.e., exist in real people or groups of people. The sole test is existence, i.e., survival (of the concepts and beliefs in real people). Total coherence or lack of ambiguity may or may not be instrumental to this survival, "depending" on reality. 

Thus, I am and know I am and strive to feel and think as if I know I am a tailor. (I'm Joel the Tailor Man.) But most tailors (i.e., most people) seem to me to deny being one, or at least strive not to be one as if this were something attainable (not to mention desirable) for everyone. But to me that is a very dangerous enterprise -- a kind of hubris, since it in effect holds out the ideal of God for human beings. But attempts to be God are precisely what cause so much trouble for the world. We are all much too liable to believing we have that capacity: to know what is and what is true (and right and good etc.) definitively. This is also precisely the meaning of the belief in One God. And guess what -- surprise: He's "our" God. So there is One Right Way, and it is "we" (in all our multiplicity and diversity!) who know it and live it and expect everyone else to also. Ergo inevitable and irremediable conflict. 

            The final hurdle for a self-aware tailor like myself, however, is to recognize that even the conception of us all as tailors is itself a worldview. Thus, even as a tailor it would be well for me to acknowledge that a different and even seemingly conflicting metaphor for our relation to truth might be just as apt (from the point of view of what I would view as another worldview that did not recognize itself as only a worldview).