H. L. Mencken
once said that the liberation of the human mind has best been
furthered by those who "heaved dead cats into sanctuaries
and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving
. . . that doubt, after all, was safe -- that the god in the
sanctuary was a fraud."
Mencken made
it sound easier than it is. It is a lifetime's work to clear
away enough debris of fraudulent divinities, false premises,
and fatuous fantasies to experience a glasnost of the soul, to
strip away enough lies that have been painted on our minds, layer
after layer, year after year, until we come to the bare walls
of our being. Still, it is this exercose, however Sisyphian,
that helps mightily to keep us human.
Inevitably such
an effort initially produces not beauty or satisfaction, but
merely a surface upon which we can work our will should we so
choose, a barren facade empty of meaning, devoid of purpose,
without rules or even clues to lead us forward. We stand before
the wall as empty as it is.
It is at this
moment that the deconstruction of mendacity and myth so often
fail the social critic, cynic, and ironist -- the street person
overdosed on experience, the college graduate overdosed on explanations,
the journalist overdosed on revelation. This is the point at
which it is too easy to wash one's hands and consider the job
done. Hasta la vista, baby, see you around the vortex of nothingness
. . .
The problem,
of course, is that void. How people handle it can be drastically
different. One may leave us with seven books, the other with
seven dead bodies. In either case, we can not stare life straight
in the eye without pain and without some longing for certainties
that once spared us that pain. If we had been born in a time
in which the therapy for doubt was punishment, even death, we
would not be in such a fix. We would thank or fear whatever gods
may be and go about our business if not happily at least with
certitude. But the gift of decriminalized doubt changed all that.
We are now free to be wrong by our own hand, to not know -- worse,
to have nothing and no one to blame.
That's why there
are so many attempts to put the question marks safely back into
the box, to recapture the illusion of security found in circumscribed
knowledge, to shut down that fleeting moment of human existence
in which at least some thought they could do the work of kings
and gods, that glimpse of possibility we thought would be an
endless future.
It is seductively
attractive to return to certainty at whatever cost, to a time
when one's every act carried its own explanation in the rules
of the universe or of the system or of the village. From the
Old Testament to neo-Nazism, humans have repeatedly found shelter
in absolutes and there is nothing in our evolution to suggest
we have lost the inclination, save during those extraordinary
moments when a wanderer, a stranger, a rebel picks up some flotsam
and says, "Hey, something's wrong here. . ." And those
of us just standing around say, "You know, you've got something
there." And we become truly human once more as we figure
out for ourselves, and among ourselves, what to do about it.
No one seeks
doubt, yet without it we become just one more coded creature
moving through nature under perpetual instruction. Doubt is the
price we pay for being able to think, play, pray and feel the
way we wish, if, of course, we can decide what that is. Which
is why freedom always has so many more questions than slavery.
Which is why democracy is so noisy and messy and why love so
often confounds us.
If we are not
willing to surrender our freedom, then we must accept the hard
work that holding on to it entails including the nagging sense
that we may not be doing it right after all; that we may not
be rewarded even if we do it right; and that we will never know
whether we have or not.
Further, the
universe is indeed indifferent to our troubles. If God or nature
refuse to cheer or punish us for our mercies or misdemeanors,
the job is left up to us. We thus find ourselves with the awesome
problem of being responsible for our own existence.
To make matters
worse, we were set upon this task early in life with little hint
that it even existed. The certainties of family, schools and
religion typically protect us from the mystery while we are very
young; we tend to learn about the loneliness of human existence
about the same time we discover one of its few known remedies,
someone else's body and love.
There is no discipline
for doubt; no academy that addresses angst. We pretend it doesn't
exist and then find ourselves seeking retroactive immunization
from some guru of tranquility or therapy.
Given that we're
talking about one of the central features of the human story,
it seems a bit sloppy and strange to omit uncertainty from the
curriculum, to not speak of how choice, informed by conscience
and community, can give wisdom and direction to doubt. Or why
it need not be the inevitable enemy of that triptych of human
survival, the hat trick of integrity, rebellion and passion.
The subject matter
is there; we just run from it. The cynic runs from the responsibility
of replacing what has been destroyed and the convinced avoids
the questions from the audience. Many of the rest are just afraid.
o
There are exceptions,
of course, among them those who view life in the manner of the
existentialists. The history of existentialism is murky and confusing,
for those lumped in the category have agreed on neither religion
nor politics. But for the purposes of getting a life rather than
tenure, Jean Paul Sartre's definition works pretty well. Sartre
believed that existence precedes essence. We are what we do.
This is the obverse of predestination and original sin with their
presumption of an innate essence. Said Sartre, "Values rise
from our actions as partridges do from the grass beneath our
feet."
In fact, some
existentialists argue that we are not fully us until we die because
until that moment we are still making decisions and taking actions
that define ourselves. Even the condemned person, one said, has
a choice of how to approach the gallows.
Wrote Sartre:
"Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
That is the first principle of existentialism . . . Man is condemned
to be free. . . From the moment he is thrown into this world
he is responsible for everything he does."
Sartre, while
the father of modern existentialism, was not the first existentialist.
For example, there was the theologian Kierkegaard, as conscious
of God as Sartre was of Marx. According to Kierkegaard, writes
Donald Palmer,
We can never
be certain that we have chosen "the right values."
This means, among other things, that there is no such thing as
existence without risk, and that existence at its very core must
be experienced as anguish and dread by every sensitive soul.
To show just
how murky existentialism can be, one of the most famous existentialist
writers, Albert Camus, even denied he was one, telling one interviewer:
No, I am not
an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our
names linked. We have even thought of publishing a short statement
in which the undersigned declare that they have nothing in common
with each other and refuse to be held responsible for the debts
they might respectively incur. . . .
Perhaps this
antipathy stemmed in part from the fact that Camus was a novelist
rather than a philosopher like Sartre, and perhaps because they
disagreed on politics, but whatever you want to call it, few
have spoken as wisely on behalf of the uncertain human spirit.
"There is no love of life without despair of life,"
said Camus. "Accepting the absurdity of everything around
us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become
a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful."
These are not
the precise and pedagogical words of a philosophy rising, yet,
as with art and love, there is no particular reasons why life
should be hostage to logical words, among the least fluid of
human expressions. Robert Frost, asked to explain a poem, replied
that if he could have said it better he would have written it
differently. Louis Armstrong, asked for a definition of jazz,
replied that if you have to ask, you'll never know. And, said
Gertrude Stein, there ain't no answer. There never was an answer,
there ain't going to be an answer. That's the answer.
In a world dominated
by dichotomies, debate, definition and deconstruction, existentialism
suggests not a result but a way, not a solution but an approach,
not goal but a far and misty horizon. It is, says Robert Solomon
"a sensibility .... an attitude towards oneself, an attitude
towards one's world, an attitude towards one's behavior."
And it's not
just a heady matter of philosophy or religion. It spills over
into business, personal relations and even politics. Mississippi
writer Tom Lowe, for example, argues that, "The greatest
evils in the world arise from two illusions:
The illusion
that "We have no choice." This belief manifests itself
in various forms, the most prominent ones being the belief in
the immutability (and often the depravity) of human nature and
the almost religious belief in the justice and rightness of laissez
faire economic systems. This is ordinarily the illusion of the
right. It is a flight from responsibility.
The illusion
that we can perfect ourselves and our society. This is a corollary
of the belief that people and their behavior are solely the product
of their environment. This is ordinarily the illusion of the
left. It is a flight from responsibility . . .
The truth lies
neither in the left or the right or in some middle-of-the-road
position that borrows from both sides. The truth is that we are
responsible for everything we do and for everyone and everything
our behavior affects, and that responsibility extends to our
collective, as well as our individual, behavior. Responsibility
is like a seamless web -- we are all connected with each other
and ultimately with the entire world. It encompasses the choices
we make in our capacity as spouses, as parents, as voters, as
stockholders, as corporate officers, as employers, as public
officials, and as purchasers of goods, but it extends to the
entire planet.
This sense of
being individually responsible yet part of a seamless web of
others produces neither certainty nor excuses. One can, one must,
be responsible without the comfort of being sure. Camus once
admitted that he would be unwilling to die for his beliefs. He
was asked why. "What if I'm wrong?" And when he spoke
of rebellion he also spoke of moderation:
There does exist
for man, therefore, a way of acting and thinking which is possible
on the level of moderation which he belongs. Every undertaking
that is more ambitious than this proves to be contradictory.
The absolute is not attained nor, above all, created through
history . . . Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at
the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its
interests. … The words that reverberate for us at the confines
of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas of optimism,
for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness,
but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of
the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.
Camus thus avoids
the pedagogue's death by definition, preferring attitude and
values rather than direction. He would never have been caught,
like that pet of corporatist post-liberalism, Francis Fukuyama,
writing a book called The End of History and the Last Man nor
claiming that history "appears to be progressive and directional."
While to the post-liberal globalist, history always proves the
victor right; Camus preferred to serve history's subject rather
than seek its spoils.
.o
Hectored, treated,
advised, instructed, and compelled at every turn, history's subjects
may falter, lose heart, courage, or sense of direction. The larger
society is then quick to blame, to translate survival systems
of the weak into pathologies, and to indict as neurotic clear
recognition of the human condition.
The safest defense
against this is apathy, ignorance, or surrender. Adopt any of
these strategies -- don't care, don't know or don't do -- and
you will, in all likelihood, be considered normal. The only problem
is that you will miss out on much of your life.
Another approach
is to be lucky enough to live in a time of heroism. As anthropologist
Ernest Becker writes
Men are naturally
neurotic and always have been, but at some times they have it
easier than at others to mask their true condition. Men avoid
clinical neurosis when they can trustingly live their heroism
in some kind of self-transcending dramas. Modern man lives his
contradictions for the worse, because the modern condition is
one in which convincing drama of heroic apotheosis, of creative
play, or of cultural illusion are in eclipse.
But even if we
are not lucky enough to fly to the moon or land on the beaches
of Normandy, there are still some who write heroic scripts for
their ordinary lives, replacing the myths that society has smashed
in the name of reality. Says Becker:
The defeat of
despair is not mainly an intellectual problem for an active organism,
but a problem of self-stimulation via movement. Beyond a given
point man is not helped by more 'knowing,' but only by living
and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we
must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of
it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging
and no reflection, and we are brutes.
It is from this
well that is drawn the strength of good firefighters and good
teachers and good grandmothers of children whose parents are
no longer parents. Their lives are works of fiction written in
order to survive the real, a reconstruction of the mythical support
a society educated beyond its wisdom thinks it no longer needs.
And so this greater society goes to therapy while the writers
of their own stories go about their business, preserving human
lives as well as the human spirit.
The problem lies
near our demand for rationality. As Becker points out, "What
typifies the neurotic is that he 'knows' his situation vis-à-vis
reality. He has no doubts; there is nothing you can say to sway
him, to give hope or trust." And he cites G. K. Chesterton
as having pointed out that the characteristics the modern mind
prides itself on are precisely those of madness:
Madmen are the
greatest reasoners we know .... All their vital processes are
shrunken into the mind. What is the one thing they lack that
sane men possess? The ability to be careless, to disregard appearances,
to relax and laugh at the world .... They can't do what religion
has always asked: to believe in a justification of their lives
that seems absurd.
o
The existential
spirit, its willingness to struggle in the dark to serve truth
rather than power, to seek the hat trick of integrity, passion
and rebellion, is peculiarly suited to our times. We need no
more town meetings, no more expertise, no more public interest
activists playing technocratic chess with government bureaucrats,
no more changes in paragraph 324B of an ineffectual law, no more
talking heads. Instead we need an uprising of the soul, that
spirit which Aldous Huxley described as "irrelevant, irreverent,
out of key with all that has gone before . . . Man's greatest
strength is his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences,
wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think
the irrelevant and unsuitable thought of a free man."
We need to think
the unthinkable even when the possible is undoable, the ideal
is unimaginable, when power overwhelms truth, when compulsion
replaces choice. We need to lift our eyes from the bottom line
unto the hills, from the screen to the sky, from the adjacent
to the hazy horizon.
And nobody can
do this but us. Hermann Hesse wrote, "Only within yourself
exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you
nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can
throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I
can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key."
Emerson agreed, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity
of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have
the suffrage of the world."
o
There is so much
to be done and so much fog around it. It is not surprising that
many in America have badly misread what has been happening. They
continue to confront ideologies that no longer exit. They fail
to see that those leading both major parties march only under
flags of convenience. They want to discuss principles with those
whose only principle is the pursuit of raw power. They wish to
discuss beliefs with those whose only belief is the defeat, submission
and ridicule of those who oppose them.
We are thus constantly
being given false choices. The real choice is whether we can
achieve a future which, singly and together, we can experience
as something other than an apocalyptic, angry, authoritarian
era of violence, greed, cruelty and planetary endangerment.
Once you reject
such a future, the remaining choice is a commitment to people,
their places and the planet. It is the almost inevitable quality
of this decision -- which each of us are already making either
by intent or accident -- that suggests the particular power,
hope and terrible danger of our times.
It is the choice
of rejecting the internal logic of a technocratic system in favor
of judging things by their effects on justice, democracy, community
and our ecology. It is a matter of asking the right questions
-- seeking the right balance rather than the best bottom line,
determining human needs rather than institutional requirements,
and finding the kindest and most sensible solution rather than
the quickest or most efficient. These are not just society's
choices, they are ours.
But here is the
dilemma. It often appears, as Matthew Arnold put it, that we
are condemned to wander between two worlds -- "one dead,
the other powerless to be born."
How can one maintain
hope, faith and energy in such an instance?
If we accept
the apparently inevitable - that is, the future as marketed to
us by the media and our leaders -- than we become merely the
audience for our own demise. Our society today teaches us in
so many ways that matters are preordained: you can't have a pay
raise because it will cause inflation, you are entitled to run
the country because you went to Yale, you are shiftless because
you are poor; there is nothing you can do to change what you
see on TV. Campaign finance reform is hopeless. You may not act
in a moral fashion because you will look foolish; you may not
take action because you might offend someone; and you may not
govern -- you may only balance the budget.
And what if we
follow this advice and these messages? If you and I do nothing,
say nothing, risk nothing, then current trends will probably
continue in which case we can expect over the next decade or
so:
More corruption,
a wealthier and more isolated upper class, more homelessness,
increased militarization, a growth in censorship, less privacy,
further loss of constitutional protections, a decline in the
standard of living, fewer corporations owning more media, greatly
increased traffic jams, more waits for services and entertainment,
more illness from toxic chemicals, more influence by drug lords,
more climatic instability, fewer beaches, more violence, more
segregation, more propaganda, less responsive government, less
power for legislatures, more for bureaucrats, less truth, less
space, less democracy, less happiness. . . .
But what if,
on the other hand, we recognize that the future of our society
and our planet will in large part simply represent the aggregate
of human choices made between now and then? Then we can stop
being passive spectators and become actors -- even more, we start
to rewrite the play. We can become the hope we are looking for.
But we are not
strong enough to be our own hope, you say. Then tell me how often
has positive social or political change ever come about thanks
to the beneficence, wisdom and imagination of those in power.
Now tell me when it has come about thanks to the persistence
of small, committed, weak groups of people willing to fail over
long periods of time until that rare, wonderful moment when the
dam of oppression, obstinacy and obtuseness finally cracks and
those in power finally accept what the people have been saying
all along.
John Adams described
well the real nature of change. He wrote that the American Revolution
"was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was
in the minds and hearts of the people . . . This radical change
in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the
people was the real American Revolution."
The key to both
a better future and our own continuous faith in one is the constant,
conscious exercise of choice even in the face of absurdity, uncertainty
and daunting odds. We are constantly led, coaxed and ordered
away from such a practice. We are taught to respect power rather
than conscience, the grand rather than the good, the acquisition
rather than the discovery. The green glasses rather than our
own unimpeded vision. Oz rather than Kansas.
Any effort on
behalf of human or ecological justice and wisdom demands real
courage rather than false optimism, and responsibility even in
times of utter madness, even in times when decadence outpolls
decency, even in times when responsibility itself is ridiculed
as the archaic behavior of the weak and naive.
There is far
more to this than personal witness. In fact, it is when we learn
to share our witness with others -- in politics, in music, in
rebellion, in conversation, in love -- that what starts as singular
testimony can end in mass transformation. Here then is the real
possibility: that we are building something important even if
it remains invisible to us. And here then is the real story:
that even without the hope that such a thing is really happening
there is nothing better for us to do than to act as if it is
-- or could be.
Here is an approach
of no excuses, no spectators, with plenty of doubt, plenty of
questions, plenty of dissatisfaction. But ultimately a philosophy
of peace and even joy because we will have thrown every inch
and ounce of our being into what we are meant to be doing which
is to decide what we are meant to be doing. And then to walk
cheerfully over the face of the earth doing it.
TO
WRITE THE AUTHOR
TO ORDER 'WHY BOTHER?'
