It Is What It Is: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? (2016)

“Keeping one eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you will never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it. . . .

‘It is what it is’ has become a common American expression, said with a touch of Stoic sigh to comment on some state of affairs that looks particularly hopeless. Insisting that it ought to be different will often earn you the kind of bemused condescension reserved for the child who kicks the chair that caused her to stumble.

It takes courage to insist that a regime that may kill, torture or jail you ought to be different, and we rightly honour those who are able to find it. That kind of courage is never easy, but it is usually straightforward. It is often easier to muster than the courage to withstand the various forms of ridicule with which more democratic cultures undermine their critics. It’s an embarrassing fact that we are often more afraid of embarrassment than a host of other discomforts, but it isn’t less true for all that. How often have you refrained from voicing hope or indignation for fear of being dismissed as childish? Oddly enough, that fear is adolescent, born of a time when few things feel worse than being regarded as less grown-up than your peers. Here Kant can help, not by providing consolation, but by assuring you that your failure to be consoled by one or another version of Stoicism is not your failure. You are right to be outraged. A satisfied mind is no substitute for a world in which behaviour is appropriately rewarded—by a grape instead of a cucumber, if that’s the going rate. Where the balance between behaviour and reward is out of kilter it needs to be repaired, not by working on your own demands for reparation but by working on the world.”—Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (2016)