The first week of a new year is often the time of bold resolutions and vocally declared good intentions. The first week of a new year is when smokers declare they are quitting, people who are not wild about working out sign up for the gym and non-readers pick up a book.
It is a clever psychological mechanism we have come up with as a society that relies on our passion for symbols: we wake up on the morning of January 1st and we feel like it is the beginning of something new, a chance to leave everything we don’t particularly like about the people we were yesterday behind us. That is not necessarily a bad thing – on the contrary, it may encourage thoughtful reflection and hence better personal and collective decision-making.
The mechanism at the base of such thinking, though, is deceptive. The idea that it is possible to mechanically change a behavior that is deeply engraved into one’s psyche based on something as arbitrary as a calendar date is a comforting illusion. It is comforting because it suggests that there is always a way to start over: it allows us to rationalize past mistakes in the interest of a clean outlook on the future. It is an illusion because it doesn’t happen; we don’t get to start over, but only to keep going with what we have and with what we are.
Saying that people don’t change but just reveal themselves for what they always were is perhaps an unnecessary (although compelling) cliché, one that I find simplistic not to say pessimistic as it would imply that none of us has any agency to change our behavior. What I do say, though, is that things never happen in a vacuum. Life-changing decisions are not made overnight, essential behavioral changes do not occur overnight. They take place over time, and they are based on circumstances that are often hard to identify.
Of course, that is a line of reasoning that can and should be applied not only to individual decisions, but to great social, economic, and geopolitical phenomena as well, as no crisis escalates in a functioning system.
Claiming that the war in Gaza began on 7 October 2023 or that the war in Ukraine began on 24 February 2021 is simplistic, as in both cases the escalation that took place on the designated date did not arise out of nowhere. In other words, it did not happen in a vacuum. That does not mean that Hamas’ attack on Israel and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should in any way be remotely justified, just that they should be understood in the historical, geographic, and temporal context in which they took place.
The temptation of assigning a starting date to events like this one is perfectly understandable, but it also dangerously reinforces a black-and-white line of thinking that is increasingly evident in public discourse. It is the idea that for any given social division, on one side are the good guys and on the other are the bad guys. It is the idea that under one candidate we will thrive and under the other we are doomed to failure. It is the idea that it is enough to be a democracy to be superior to autocracies. These arguments may have a base, and that base may even be solid, but reality is hardly ever black and white, and there are hardly ever an absolute right and an absolute wrong.
So, there you have the two components of my own resolution for 2024, which will partly be explored through the present weekly column. First, never forget that things do not happen in a vacuum. Second, embrace greyness, and despise whoever tries to convince you that in a given debate there exists an absolute right that will always beat an absolute wrong.
Happy new year.
Raised in Rome by Bosnian parents, I try to use writing as a tool to decipher the world around me and all its complexities by taking different perspectives into consideration. In Bocconi, I am studying Politics and Policy Analysis.
