The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

FACING REALITY

ANYONE WHO reads and writes history or economics or science must sometimes wonder what fiction is, where its boundaries are, if they exist at all. The question implies certain distinctions, as between fiction and fact, or, more cautiously, between fiction and nonfiction. I would suggest that, while such distinctions are real, they are also profoundly relative, conditional, and circumstantial. Almost everything we have a name for exists in the universe of time and matter, and should, so it seems to me, be assumed to share certain of their essential qualities, two of these being ineluctability and profound resistance to definition.

Yet we have put together among ourselves a rigidly simple account of life in the world, which we honor with the name Reality and which, we now assure one another, must be faced and accepted, even or especially at the cost of those very things which societies we admire are believed by us to value, for example education, the arts, a humane standard of life for the whole of the community. Science fetches back from its explorations mystery upon mystery, yet somehow we feel increasingly sunk in a world of mere things, in a hard-edged Reality that disallows imagination except to exact tribute from it, in portraits which assert its own power and ferocity, or in interludes and recreations which concede by their triviality that only Reality matters. Our present model of the world is a fiction, based on notions of objectivity and of the character and implications of science which are a hundred years out of date. It is based on the flotsam and detritus and also the floor sweepings of all disciplines — psychology, penology, economics, history, all of them. From them it takes its important tone, helpful in magnifying any present obsession. For many of us it is true to say, Reality marks our ballots, even rears our children. It is such a poor contrivance that we would not believe in it for a minute if we did not want to. Yet it flourishes, because it is the servant and gatekeeper of dearer interests, a prized dependent upon which we in fact depend.

(I depart here from what I hope is a tone of moderation for a long moment of parenthetical candor. As a fiction writer, I feel smothered by this collective fiction, this Reality. I do not admire it or enjoy it, this work of grim and minor imagination which somehow or other got itself acknowledged as The Great Truth and The Voice of Our Time because of rather than despite its obvious thinness and fraudulence. So I will give it a bad review, in the spirit of cankered optimism which moves all indignant reviewers. Maybe I can hit it on the head, put an end to it. This is not a realistic hope. Maybe others will agree with me, and start a brilliant movement in a direction I cannot anticipate, and they will put an end to it. This is scarcely more realistic.

But these collective fictions matter. They have the profoundest influence on what we know and see and understand. When they make fear the key to interpretation of history and experience, as they do so often, as ours does now, nothing contains a greater potential for releasing all the varieties of destruction. Fearfulness assumes a hidden narrative — that we are ill despite our apparent health, vulnerable despite our apparent safety. We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind. Routinely discounting the preponderance of evidence is not the behavior of reasonable people, nor is devaluing present experience because it may be overtaken by something worse. I think we are not taking responsibility for keeping ourselves reasonable, individually or collectively — that we no longer admire or reward reasonableness because it has lost its place in our imagination. Now it is as if public discourse exists only to be disrupted, as if gaffes and scandals, without regard to their authenticity or significance, were the real substance of collective life, and attempts at coherent conversation about what is to be wished for or what is to be done were pretension or naiveté or a strategy of concealment, the bland surface through which the next brainless sensation is sure to erupt. When a good man or woman stumbles, we say, “I knew it all along,” and when a bad one has a gracious moment, we sneer at the hypocrisy. It is as if there is nothing to mourn or to admire, only a hidden narrative now and then apparent through the false, surface narrative. And the hidden narrative, because it is ugly and sinister, is therefore true.

Lately Americans have enjoyed pretending they are powerless, disenfranchised individually and deep in decline as a society, perhaps to grant themselves latitude responsible people do not have or desire. In fact, our ability to do harm, by act or omission, is great beyond all reckoning, and greater by the measure of our refusal to accept this fact and its implications. Powerless people can hardly demand coherency of themselves, since they must always react to forces they cannot trust, whose wiles they cannot anticipate. They are safe from responsibility, safe from blame.

Before I leave the pretended shelter of this aside I will say two things more. First, individuals have collective fiction as a reality to deal with. Anyone who has brought up children knows the overwhelming power of the larger culture, and how for the peace and sanity of the family it must be in some degree accommodated. Anyone who struggles to meet the expectations the society creates must cope with emotional injury and exhaustion, or at best, very unsatisfying rewards. We are all in effect dragooned into it, enforcing compliance on ourselves, because as individuals we have few real choices, even if we know we should want them. It is hard to be critical of a society without seeming uncompassionate toward its members, yet, mysteriously, societies themselves tend not to be compassionate toward their members, and must be criticized for that reason.

Second, the art of fiction, intentional and acknowledged fiction, the kind with the author’s name on it, lies outside this phenomenon of collective fiction for the most part, and often attempts by one means or another to grapple with it. But Reality, the collective fiction, has educated our audience, as surely as the pulpit educated Emerson’s. It has given the writer little to build on and little of interest to explore. (I dream this might change.)

Our collective fiction is full of anxiety, empty of humor and generosity. It elaborates itself in the manner of phobia or delusion rather than vision or fancy. We find comfort in anxiety because it engrosses our attention, which we have in surplus, and are usually at a loss to employ. And anxiety is a stimulant, like love, like hatred, though generally not so prone to extravagant expression as they are, indeed even secretive, and therefore liable suddenly to produce great effects from what are apparently very small causes.

Here is one topic under which the phenomenon of anxiety can be considered. As a culture we are terrified of illness, though as people go we are rather safe from it. Perhaps to feed our anxiety, illness for us has overspilled definition and is now to be discovered everywhere, in everyone. Emotions are regarded as symptoms and treated medically, including, of course, anxiety. This is true even while the boundless resources of the society seem largely bent to the work of stimulating fear, disgust, resentment — emotions that in fact are pathological and also pathogenic. It is as if we took morphine to help us sleep on a bed of nails. Another generation would have looked for another solution.

Our terror of doctors and of medications is a generalization of the same anxiety that drives us to them, another form of hypochondriasis. Obviously both doctors and medications have the potential to do great harm, first of all because they are creatures of this civilization. Doctors responded too frequently to patients’ demands for antibiotics, for example, and compromised the usefulness of antibiotics in the course of launching a spectacular advance in the evolution of bacteria. I think it is fair to assume that doctors are responding too frequently now to other demands, whose consequences will, in not too long a time, bring fresh and vivid new grounds for anxiety. We will not reflect, or draw the lessons of experience, because fearful people improvise solutions, and feel too powerless to consider a problem from the point of view of their own responsibility.

Here I should make a distinction between the fictional and the false. They are entirely different things. The givens of the collective fiction I have been describing are that societies decay; that youth ends and the body fails; that strangers sometimes mean us harm and friends sometimes connive in our ruin; that things are rarely as they appear to us; that out of any present circumstance there might arise misfortune in the face of which we would be utterly helpless. Not a word of this is false. Common sense will confirm it all.

Nor do we indulge in the falsehood that we can make ourselves secure, even while desperate effort is clearly assumed to be the appropriate response to our condition. We are busy as rodents. But this is for the most part not real purpose, merely anxiety expending itself. Beside their root in fact, I think these collective narratives may have something like an organic life, in the way they invade experience and transform it to the uses of their own survival. Anxiety-driven people are right to be anxious. They are prone to stress and burnout, to illness and early death. They have trouble creating satisfactory friendships and families. What if they have misappropriated their time just sufficiently to allow their children to become ominous strangers? What if they have made a too single-minded investment of their lives, and then the market for their skills plunges? These things happen — anyone who has ever glanced at a newspaper knows it. They are right to lie awake.

The truth to which all this fiction refers, from which it takes its authority, is the very oldest truth, right out of Genesis. We are not at ease in the world, and sooner or later it kills us. Oddly, people in this culture have been relatively exempt from toil and pangs and from death, too, if length of life may be regarded as a kind of exemption. So why do these things seem to terrify us more than they do others? One reason might be that, as human populations go, we are old. A few decades ago the median age was in late adolescence, and now it is deep into adulthood. Midlife has overtaken the great postwar generation. So the very fact that we have, in general, enjoyed unexampled health has brought us in vast numbers into the years where even the best luck begins to run out. This is true of the whole Western world.

Less fortunate countries have younger populations, so the nonchalance for which youth is famous, and for which it was once admired, may be imagined to figure in their sense of things more importantly than it does in ours. It is true that they are warlike. But it is true also that a crankiness is rising in the great gray West, a brooding over old grudges and injuries, that can only alarm. I think we may have begun to see youth as Preadulthood Syndrome, a pathology to be treated with therapy and medications if it is our own, and a pestilence to be isolated if it is the youth of fecund and short-lived populations. The anxious find special terrors in unpredictability.

Jefferson said every generation has the right to make its own laws, and perhaps it has as well the right to identify illness for its own purposes. It could be that the society is too brittle just now to tolerate rambunctiousness, and not confident enough to attempt discipline or acculturation. To say that behavior is aberrant is much more powerfully coercive among us than to say an action is wrong. It implies the behavior is not really willed or controlled, and this undermines the self-confidence of the offending person. It also excuses him from responsibility, though, curiously, those taken to be the cause of his illness — his parents, usually — are assumed to have caused it through freely chosen and straightforwardly reprehensible behavior, for which blame and punishment are just and therapeutic. This makes no sense, and no one cares. The narrative is about something else, something involving fusions and displacements and improvised reconciliations among incompatible conceptions or metaphors, and we are so invested in this work that we do not choose to see the clumsiness of it. The inconsistency probably means nothing more than that we can neither accept the idea of responsibility nor be rid of it, so we relegate it to the minor characters.

I suggest that, for us, the sense of sickness has replaced the sense of sin, to which it was always near allied, and that while we are acutely aware of the difficulties surrounding notions of good and evil, we ignore, though they are manifest, the equally great difficulties surrounding notions of sickness and health, especially as these judgments are applied to behavior. Antebellum doctors described an illness typical of enslaved people sold away from their families, which anyone can recognize as rage and grief. By medicalizing their condition, the culture was able to refuse the meaning of their suffering. I am afraid we also are forgetting that emotions signify, that they are much fuller of meaning than language, that they interpret the world to us and us to other people. Perhaps the reality we have made fills certain of us, and of our children, with rage and grief — the tedium and meagerness of it, the meanness of it, the stain of fearfulness it leaves everywhere. It may be necessary to offer ourselves palliatives, but it is drastically wrong to offer or to accept a palliative as if it were a cure.

Perhaps some part of our peculiar anxiety might be accounted for this way. Historically, cultures have absorbed those irreducible truths about the harshness of life and the certainty of death into mythic or religious contexts. The long miseries and vanquished heroics of Troy inspired the world for millennia, though there is not much in the tale to offer comfort except the spectacle of futility on an epic scale. I am not sure we have at the moment any notion of comfort in that sense, of feeling the burdens which come with being human in the world lifted by compassionate imagination. Our always greater eagerness to describe ourselves as sufferers makes us always less willing to identify with suffering as a fact of human life. It may be that we cannot bear to undermine our sense of special grievance, or our belief — consistent with the medicalization of our sorrows and in general with our ceasing to value inward experience — that they are indeed aberrant, that they say nothing meaningful to us or for us.

Our civilization believed for a long time in God and the soul and sin and salvation, assuming, whatever else, that meaning had a larger frame and context than this life in this world. Polls indicate that we in America have not really abandoned these beliefs, and that is interesting, because what I have called our collective fiction is relentlessly this-worldly, very serious indeed about material success, of all things. Success, that object of derision in every wisdom literature ever penned, not more dignified now that it is so very slackly bound to real attainment, not more beautiful now that its appurtenances generally amount to a higher tawdriness. Knowing this, we nevertheless make it stand in the place of worth. Among us, a pedestal one day is a pillory the next, because we fawn on people who would have been fortunate, in some cases grateful, simply to have escaped notice. Then we punish them relentlessly for being no more than they are and always were. This while we continue to speak very much as though success were a thing to be envied.

I think the true name for what we aspire to is nonfailure. Most of those who are household names in this strange time are objects of horror or derision, a fact which in many instances reflects our need rather than their deserving. My son came home from school once staggered by a discussion of Abraham Lincoln, whom he revered. None of the other students would be persuaded that Lincoln went into politics for anything but the money. The grandeur of his speeches merely proved the depth of his cynicism. In the same way, we can refuse evidence of actual merit, and we can discredit seriousness, and we can feel morally acute while we do it. Our defenses against real success are invulnerable. Our hostility to success of every kind is demonstrated afresh every day.

But nonfailure is another thing. Income and credit shrewdly managed, desiderata learned from the better shops and catalogs and systematically acquired — for better and for worse, this is not much to aspire to. It is because our hopes are in fact so very modest that we can be made to fear another teenager with a baby might snatch them all away. It is because we hope to acquire rather than to achieve — in the old language of religion, to receive rather than to give — that the good we imagine can truly be taken from our hands.

Then what about religion? If we do in significant numbers actually believe that we have a greater and a different destiny than other created things, if we believe there is a God who hears the cries of the oppressed and who takes almighty and everlasting cognizance of our actions and our thoughts — I think these views are widely held — how do we represent the world to ourselves in terms that effectively disallow such considerations? Where did religion go? I know I risk being unfair in characterizing television religion, because I have not paid much attention to it. But it seems to me more television than religion by a good margin. It is adept at exciting minor emotions and at stimulating viewer loyalty. It bears about the same relation to religion All My Children bears to King Lear. I can see how someone stuck at home might prefer it to golf. There is no snobbery in saying things differ by the measure of their courage and their honesty and their largeness of spirit, and that the difference is profoundly one of value. Television has not taken over the expression of religious sensibility, any more than vendors of souvenir Eiffel Towers have deprived Paris of a monument.

What if, in important numbers, we believe there is a God who is mysterious and demanding, with whom one is not easily at peace? What if we believe there will be a reckoning? I find no evidence that such beliefs were felt to be discredited or that they were consciously abandoned. They simply dropped out of the cultural conversation. And, at the same time, we adopted this very small view of ourselves and others, as consumers and patients and members of interest groups, creatures too minor, we may somehow hope, for great death to pause over us. If we do still believe in the seriousness of being human, while we have lost the means of acknowledging this belief, even in our thoughts, then profound anxiety, whose origins we would be at a loss to name, seems to me an inevitable consequence. And this may account for both the narrowness and the intensity of the fiction that contains us. It is our comfort and our distraction. We are spiritual agoraphobes.

To borrow a question from Jean Genet, what would happen if someone started laughing? What if the next demographically marketed grievance or the next convenience-packaged dread, or the next urgent panacea for the sweet, odd haplessness of the body started a wave of laughter that swept over the continent? What if we understood our vulnerabilities to mean we are human, and so are our friends and our enemies, and so are our cities and books and gardens, our inspirations, our errors. We weep human tears, like Hamlet, like Hecuba. If the universe is only all we have so far seen, we are its great marvel. I consider it an honor to follow Saint Francis or William Tyndale or Angelina Grimké or Lydia Maria Child anywhere, even to mere extinction. I am honored in the cunning of my hand. This being human — people have loved it through plague and famine and siege. And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced.