This week it is half a century ago that Pablo Picasso passed away, the painter who changed our view of reality forever. Together with his friend and rival Georges Braque, soon followed by others, he developed his Cubist style more than a century ago. A subversive force, like Annie Cohen-Solal in her beautiful Un étranger nomme Picasso tells.
The Cubists do not paint the illusion of three dimensions in a two-dimensional plane, but several equivalent angles, with each time shifting points of view. In doing so, they portray things as they really are, not as they appear to the outsider. This radical way of seeing from multiple points of view also found its way beyond painting. The gripping As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is such a polyphonic story from several equal protagonists.
Cubism also provides a metaphor for political debate. You could say that many politicians have stuck in the two-dimensional appearance of the flat surface, without an eye for stratification and additional points of view. Much of the current discourse consists of polarizing words. Embedded in each word is the dimension of the opposite pole.
Take the term ‘gap’, which immediately refers to a dichotomy: elite and people (or as Van Kooten and De Bie called it: the Men and Women of the Bottom); big city and countryside; The Hague and provinces; officials and citizens. Such language suggests a simplistic dichotomy, which makes nothing manageable and conceals everything.
Of course there is a certain gulf between urban and rural areas. But the countryside does not form a unity, and includes much more than farmers and country people. There, a group of well-to-do citizens increasingly live in renovated farms that fit just as well in the canal belt or in Het Gooi. And in those big cities more and more people with a migration background live who have nothing in common with an urban elite in terms of values and lifestyle. By the way, who are these elite anyway? The wealthy entrepreneur in Wassenaar or the teacher who reads Piketty and transfers money to Doctors without Borders?
Politicians – and many others – need to avoid binary perspective language, tear themselves out of their transmitting mode and stop polarizing toots. For example, avoid the word class, especially underclass. Or even worse, the word transition, let alone radical transition. Why not speak of transition or development, suggesting a gradual direction that is not necessarily authoritarian? It is precisely this insistence on urgency and coercion that confirms the two-dimensional perspective. It is black or white, but it is never that sharp in a democracy.
In that hammering there is a miserable world view that frightens other parties and citizens, the ‘cake thinking’. That was already in previous terms such as limits to growth, or in the image of humanity in an overcrowded lifeboat. As if the world is a cake that goes up, where many have to fall by the wayside. Even with all the concerns about climate and raw materials, there is really no reason to think that there are suddenly urgent shortages. More people on earth are living in greater prosperity than ever before. Biscuit thinking marginalizes those who do not possess this great global overview.
Use language that allows multiple perspectives, that does not force dichotomies, but creates space. Practice multiple perspectives by listening to implicit fears. Come on, cabinet, BBB and others: dare to have a ‘cubist’ consultation in which words are not just a label that distances you?
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 3, 2023