The Beast

Lest my long silence followed by such a lengthy crumb lead to any misconceptions, I have been working on other things in recent weeks; nearly all of what follows was written yesterday, on the train from Boston to Philadelphia, and the remainder added today, on the commuter rail from Philadelphia to New York. Things have changed (in me? in the world?) since last I wrote, and though my concerns remain the same, the shape of my crumbs, the crumb of my bread, will be different from what it was, in this and upcoming posts, if there are any.

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Everyone is panicked, but their reasons differ. For some it’s global warming. For some, Trump. For some, racism, Afro-Pessimism, or on the other hand, hysteria over identity politics. Technology, apostasy, the sexualization of popular culture. And for me, who does not affirm any of these as reasons to panic (though I affirm them all as evils), what is it that troubles me? For, though mine is not a state of panic, neither is it one of calm, much less of trust, of faith in the world.

Last night in bed, unable to sleep, it seemed to me I saw all these fears, all these evils, all these deteriorations, knitted together in one great system, which madly fed and grew and whirled all around me in the darkened room. I had glimpsed the parts before, but never had I seen them all brought together with such vast and terrible coherence.

We were atomized, our communities loose and transient, families scattered and estranged. Even if we held still, nothing held still around us. Businesses closed, were sold to large conglomerates; buildings were torn down and replaced by uglier ones; people moved away to new places and new people came who did not know the place they were moving to and did not plan to stay long and therefore did not bother to get to know it. They were not uncaring, only lost and lonely, not knowing how to begin, having forgotten what it is like to feel at home in a place. The objects we used were all disposable and correspondingly ugly; they had no history; no grandmother’s initials adorned them; very little in the way of memory or sentiment attached to them. Everything was a product and so everything was marketed and so everything became kitsch and nothing was real. Bright lights burnt all night; we did not see the stars; it was never quiet. We stared at screens; we comforted ourselves with the most miraculous passive entertainment; we clicked refresh on our gmail, hoping for a message.

Thus, for a long time, a sense of dislocation had been growing; we lacked grounding, faith, presence. We no longer seemed to live at the center of the world (c.f. Eliade, The Sacred & the Profane); the world itself was not the center of anything anymore. We had no trust in the cycles of years and generations; we neither believed that these cycles would continue in their age-old manner, nor affirmed them as good and necessary. Once we had taken solace in this cyclic continuity, once it had comforted us in the face of death and loss; our faith in the world had been a faith in its continuity; as one thing ended another began. Now we could not face death, for there was no cycle in which it could find its place; we hid from it stubbornly, like Adam hiding from God, like a child covering its eyes. We could not accept disaster; we denied its necessity; we regulated life to prevent it; but it came anyhow, and we went looking for someone to blame.

But of late, the process has reached a new stage of evolution, has taken on a new, desperate velocity.

(There is solace in the material world, in its unquenchable reality and presence. We are riding past scattered houses, trees, bogs at the edge of a town, beside the railroad tracks. The earth is covered in dead leaves, the bog now clothed in green algae, now in gray-white ice. Wiry shrubs cling to the low earth where it rises up out of the water; around the patches of earth, wreathes of ice; beyond the ice, dark water, like the dark land revealed beneath a departing fog. We pass a car lot and the sun’s reflection goes dancing across the windshields, like the glass lozenges in the church of Combray. Then cars and bog and houses give way, and there is a winter wood, bare trees and scattered pines and an old-style wooden fence beside a road where a truck drives lazily.)

Not knowing how to die, we do not know how to live (c.f. Ruskin, "The Roots of Honor"). We are in a state of perpetual anxiety. It is no longer enough simply to get and eat the daily bread, to love, to argue, to do our work and go home to bed. We are insatiable. We want to do something ever bigger, ever newer; nothing is enough.

In every profession, I saw this process at work. The baker is not content to bake good bread, to kneed the dough and make his customers happy; he wishes to expand, to hire underlings, to develop new products, to run a chain of bakeries; he wishes to rise into the bourgeoisie. This example is already very old; it is impossible now to imagine a baker who is happy simply to bake bread and feed his neighbors and get by; the idea is absurdly quaint. But such people not only did once exist; they were the only sort of baker that existed; all bakers were such quaint figures. Were they happy? I do not know what the question even means, but they were content: they did not long for more, more, more. They had faith in their world, their life, their worth. (c.f. this passage from Pasolini). Of course it is not only that such a person is now unimaginable; were such a person suddenly to spring into being today— a person capable of being satisfied simply to make bread for his neighbors and thereby to get the necessities of life—, he would discover that the world had no place for him: his neighbors get their bread at the supermarket; they do not know each other or him; nor will they remain his neighbors for long but will move away and be replaced by others. He could only open an “artisanal” bakery, become a purveyor of luxury products to wealthy strangers,. The conditions that made that old form of satisfaction possible are simply gone.

In the same way, the professor does not have time for the students she mentors, because she is busy writing the next book, which must be not merely an ordinary book but a groundbreaking book, a book that will change the field. The teacher is not content to remain a teacher. He must become a principal, and then he must start his own school. Several years ago, as part of some research I was doing at the time, I had the opportunity to speak with a number of recent school founders and headmasters. Every one of them had a ten-year plan to start five more schools. To found a school was not enough; such a vast undertaking seemed to them petty; only some few hundred children could be helped in that way. But I knew that even twenty, even a hundred schools would not satisfy them, that nothing would satisfy them, not because of their pride but because of their despair; because everything had lost its substance, had become a mere abstraction, not only for them but for me as well.

We search for some worthwhile project, but having lost the basic grounding of life, nothing is worthwhile. Our elders tell us we expect to much from a job; in fact, we expect far too little: we only pursue these materialist philanthropic ambitions; what we long for but cannot name and do not dare to believe in is far more substantial.

Thus, desperate, maddened, we wander the earth, changing jobs, selling businesses, moving apartments, purchasing furniture, throwing away furniture, renovating storefronts, gutting hotels.

(A film of ice lies on the surface of puddles; its delicate ridges glitter between tufts of meadow grass. The meadow rolls past and now comes the great shining water of some bay, and the trellis of a bridge throws its flickering shadow through the train window, and black ducks and white swans cluster by a wooden dock, and the posts where the boats are tied are like teeth, and flat flat fields of yellow-brown grass spread out over the surface of the water.)

We feel that something has gone terribly wrong, but it is hard to know what. So many evils surround us; so much has changed; so many sacred things have been violated—nature, religion, decency, civility, human rights. All these evils are real, but the loss of faith makes them more terrifying than they would be: for we have no faith that these evils, like all else, will pass. This new terrible aspect is not illusory, it is real; but it comes less from the particular evil than from the general state of mistrust in the continuity of the world. Note the irony: because the world has become impermanent and unstable, evils have come to seem permanent. This is strange but not contradictory. The affirmation that “this too shall pass” is an affirmation that the cycles of the world will continue, that a stability stands above the ephemerality of phenomena; without this stability, it becomes entirely possible that the world will change utterly and it will never regain its natural state—not through an act of god but through mere error and bad management, through mindless feedback systems set in motion by accident.

Now say that I choose one particular evil to fix on—global warming, for example. I am frightened of climate change, and with good reason, but climate change is not yet significantly affecting me, not certainly in an everyday manner. The effects I fear lie in the future. But I seem to feel the pain of it, the horror of it, now. Already, my ordinary world, with all its simple pleasures, seems to be gone. My general diffuse sense of insecurity and dissatisfaction and faithlessness has attached itself to the prospect of climate change. The danger is real, but the general sense of doom I am feeling comes not solely or even primarily from the threat of climate change. It is generated all around me by the conditions of modern life.

The more worried I and people like me become about climate change, the more we want to tell others about it. We applaud when newspaper headlines report on it. But (because of the radical segregation of friend-groups by political alignment; and the less radical segregation of newspaper subscription; and the way online content is customized for users) the only people who listen to us or read these headlines are people like us. So our efforts to inform others succeed only in immersing ourselves in a sort of house of horrors, where we can never for a moment forget our fears. This is what’s called an echo chamber: not a place where people affirm each other’s views in glib satisfaction; a place where frightened people, trying to do something with their fear, only make one another more frightened.

The longer this goes on, the more frustrated I become. At first urgent, I turn resentful, then disdainful. I feel that the world is plagued by fools who won’t see the truth. They, with their different grievances, feel that they are plagued by people like me. The world seems to be teeming with lunatics, lunatics we rarely meet but read about often. This breeds paranoia. Feeling that our very existence is threatened, we perceive threats everywhere.

(Evening is falling. Along the horizon, the factories of New Jersey breathe plumes of smoke like gray genies against the deepening sky. The land is flat, bathed in purple light, dotted with yellow lamps hung on steel spires. The bare trees are like diagrams of trees, etched onto the sky. Everything becomes a silhouette, smooth and dark and perfectly delineated. We pass cities. Buildings, tall black and featureless, fill train window. A river slides smoothly past, lined with highways and cars like Christmas lights. The light of the land overwhelms the last light of the sky.)

Without faith that there is meaning in experience—and all meaning depends on faith, for meaning cannot be “proved”—without this faith, suffering is intolerable. Suffering becomes tolerable when we can get wisdom from it, but without a ground of meaning, wisdom cannot exist, for life then is not a book full of secrets but a plain brute fact, behind which lies nothing. Without faith in meaning there is, as far as experience goes, only pleasure and pain, success and failure; and, as far as knowledge goes, only fact and fiction. Hence the discourse of trauma, which describes suffering only in terms of damage, never in terms of growth. In these conditions, all grievances become immense.

There is in fact evidence that the world contains meaning (faith is not belief without evidence, only trust without proof), but this evidence is found, in large part, in suffering. So the more we see suffering as merely bad, the less we notice what else there is inside it, the less possibility that we can rediscover faith. Thus in everything, despairing of our higher longings, we cling jealously to thin substitutes, and are worse and worse in spirit and in action.

These and many other systems of evil effects I saw flowing, circulating, like blood, within the great beast that had arisen out of, that stood upon, that organized and coordinated and gave life to human civilization (as the soul gives life to the body, as the processes of the organism give life to the chemicals that compose it), as I lay on the futon in Anna’s guest room in Somerville, MA, last night. But surely this was only one of those visions that comes in the dead of night instead of sleep.