Editorial Notes: on Blindness

“the only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see” wrote José Saramago, Nobel prize winner, in his 1995 book Blindness  (Ensaio sobre a Cegueira).

In it, everyone suddenly becomes blind for unknown reasons, and only one woman is kept untouched from this strange condition. Not really untouched, though. She is the witness, sometimes the carer and guide, to a group of people who endure the most terrifying conditions of quarantine and try to survive while society as they know it crashes and fumbles with every single person losing their eyesight. During the ordeal and crisis, people get hurt and hurt one another, many try to maintain their values and to use their reason (for it was only the eyes that got affected), pray to their gods, comfort their loved ones, as well as all those who were strangers – sometimes enemies – until the crisis brought them together. The group that includes the woman who can see is composed of all sorts of personalities, needs and ideas, and the novel follows them as they try to stick together and overcome this critical situation.

Sometimes scientists – such as ourselves – are considered the ones who can truly see – observe – a situation. Merton, in his “Social Theory and Social Structure” implies that it is the sociologist who can really see the latent functions of social events and practices, while the participants of those activities remain blind to them, aiming only for what the author considers to be the manifest functions. However, most of us are participants in the world we inhabit; most of us are the (un-fortunate?) ones who experience, who hurt, who discuss ideas and uphold values. The ones who try to stick together in critical situations.

And let us be honest. There has been no meagre supply of crises in the last 25 years. Wars and atrocities, climate change and stable anihilation of biodiversity, financial crises, refugees dying on shores, terrorism, unemployment and precarity, autocratic manifestations in democratic states, IA and bots and fake news, pandemics... – just to name a few. And most of us are not in a (privileged?) position to be able to see the whole picture. We are pushed and pulled, and hang on and let go, we try to think while feeling deeply, we protect our loved ones and learn to care for strangers, occasionally we rest so we can keep up, we try to act - sometimes screaming, sometimes silently.  We are the blinds. We are the participants of social events. We use our frequently limited resources to try to make sense of our function and the functions of what is happening to us and to the rest of mankind, even more so when we are committed to social sciences and human rights.

But we are the blind ones, and no one can claim to be the one who sees it all. And, in the end, would we dare to? To see it all...?