9: Heart of Darkness
“In the middle of my
life, I found myself lost within a dark wood…”
--Dante, Canto I of
“The Inferno”
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| Haters gotta hate. |
Abandon all hope
“I hate people!” one of my kids used to declare, um, a bit emphatically, back when she was in high
school.
I was a little shocked, of course, when I first heard this vast
negativity coming from a young and tender person. But I
also knew what her high school was like, and the brutal things kids did to each
other there, especially high school girls… I’d seen “Mean Girls,” and even
lived the movie myself once or twice. This actually was not something she said
rarely – it became a repeated theme, as she found dealing with the daily unpleasantnesses
of her peers regularly annoying. It
applied to her teachers as well, to her sisters, and, I’d guess, sometimes to
her parents.
After a while, the sentiment became familiar and made sense
to me as a certain kind of worldview. Like Mary in reverse, I held this angry
ethos in my heart, even after my daughter grew out of it, because it became my worldview too, after a while. This
became a pregnant quote for me, full of meaning. Here are some other quotes
that I often mutter:
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” (Samuel
Johnson)
“The world is too much with us” (William Wordsworth)
“Good fences make good neighbors” (Robert Frost)
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (Jake, “The Sun Also Rises”)
“Hell is other people” (Jean Paul Sartre)
“Have you no sense of decency,
sir?” (Joseph Welch)
“You knew what a horrid girl I was when you married me!”
(Elizabeth Taylor in “Giant”)
“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”
(“Network”)
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” (Kris
Kristofferson)
“You can’t handle the truth!!!” (Jack Nicholson in “A Few
Good Men”)
“We have met the enemy and he is us” (Pogo)
“O, the horror, the horror!” (Joseph Conrad)
You may sense a slight trend here. You may sense a subtle whiff of the negative –
anger, disdain and disgust towards fellow humans.
It’s what we used to call “misanthropy” (literally, hatred
of men). But that was back in the
“quaint” old days when we thought
about our attitudes and social values, weighed them morally and gave them
high-falluntin’ names so we could label them, distance ourselves from our bad
behaviors and attitudes, as if they were a medical condition. Anger, disdain,
disgust. Yes, I feel these emotions often,
and yes, I know it’s “not cool.” I don't distance myself from this because it's undeniably part of me. Judge
me for being too-too bleak, but the thing is, pilgrim, you feel this darkness
too, I know you do.
Before I embrace the Dark Side (which, indeed, I plan to do
here), let me get out of the way the fact that I personally embrace an ideology that says that this is all very, very
wrong-headed. I’m actually a
Christian (though you wouldn’t know it to read me) and I take very seriously
what I think is Jesus’s “prime directive" to us:
"The foremost (commandment) is, 'Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God
is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' "The
second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other
commandment greater than these."
A Christian’s one central commandment is to love. As numerous theologians and scholars have pointed out,
the second commandment is really just a corollary to the first. We know
ourselves, our purpose and our God through no experience more than through knowing
other people. We can’t know God without getting outside our sterile selves. We call embracing the humanity of our fellow
humans “The Golden Rule” and the idea is at the heart of almost every major
religion and of all morality. Love other people like yourself. Forgive
other people’s weaknesses and evils the way you want to be forgiven for yours.
Because God hasn’t blotted us off the planet, He/She must love us despite
everything and has forgiven our sins -- so
that makes it clearly Godly behavior to do so to others. Getting with the divine
program is the way to peace. I repeat: the prime directive tells us to love.
Or does it? It says to "love your neighbor as yourself." This doesn't actually means that you must love other people, just admit fair fellowship with them. From my own experience, the more I know other people, the more I understand them, the more I see myself and see my own actions, failures and inescapable weaknesses in theirs – the more I hold them in contempt (“We have met the enemy and he is us”). Close identity with others breeds contempt because… I hold myself in contempt. It’s not that I don’t love myself – I do, but it’s a primal, selfish, animal love that I can’t help, a childish self-esteem that flies in the face of everything I know about myself. It’s melodramatic to say so, but I know I don’t deserve to be loved by myself, and if I forgive myself, then even more so, right? Selfish, hypocritical, self-centered pig! So when I see my own weaknesses in the weaknesses of others, I can’t help but hold them in the deep contempt, that, were I a decent and honest person, I would honestly feel towards myself.
Oh, I know this is a pretty depressing syllogism. (By now, you know what I have to say is generally pretty much a downer -- “You knew what a horrid girl I was when you married me!”). But the practical point that I’m trying to make is that, since I can’t allow myself to feel the self-contempt I know I deserve, I can’t help but aim it at all the other people I recognize myself in, instead.
Perhaps this is
just my personal angst and anguish, the
bitter musings of a grumpy old guy, but somehow I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. I
hold up for evidence… Facebook.
In the other essays
in this series, I’ve already spent a lot of time criticizing our internet
behaviors, but let me point to the popular observation/condemnation that there
are really only three kinds of things that people post on Facebook:
1) Jealousy-inducing brags about how cool/wonderful/exotic others lives
are,
2)
Cute animal pictures/videos, and
3) Posts expressing outrage at what those other, uber-evil people are doing.
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| The internet is pretty much packed with memes like this. |
Note that numbers 1
and 3 are about causing/expressing hatred of others, and number 2 is
“uplifting” and “positive” explicitly because
it is not about people (except,
occasionally children, in which case the kids are offspring of the poster, in
which case the post is properly classified as #1). Of course, there are combinations of these
categories too – my favorites are posts expressing outrage (3) at people for being
cruel to cute animals (2). I myself am
particularly prone to posting #3 (outrage), which occasionally invites the
outrage of other people (double 3!), who try to make me jealous of their moral
superiority (1) by suggesting that I need to spend more time posting pictures
of cute animals (2). No matter what, our
shared love of our fellow man just keeps on flowing (“Hell is other people”).
Why is the virtual world so
seething with our animosity towards each other? I think I’ve already given the
primary reason to that that a bit earlier in this essay, but there are other
things to say as well. First, modern life is sufficiently inter-connected
(though I have argued that we are unconnected in other essays) that we are
constantly rubbing up against other people, which is stressful and… annoying.
The more time we spend watching and listening to other people, the more
annoying they become (“The world is too much with us”), which is why we should
spend more time with animals instead (unless a friend has suggested this for mood-lifting
therapy). More solitude is probably what we need, though that might lead to
brooding (… about other people -- “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”).
A second point is
that we have too much time and freedom on our hands and that encourages bad
behavior. As our mothers instinctively knew, too much freedom is bad for us
(“Freedom’s just another word for
nothing left to lose”), because when we are left to our own wild emotions and
selfish devices, we inevitably get into trouble. We need the restrictions and defined borders
of a civil society, with its rules and manners and required politenesses (“Good fences make good neighbors). But the
internet -- now the communication backbone of our society -- has blown this to
hell with its total openness (see my piece “Resistance Is Futile”), which, of
course, means that we retreat to the claustrophobia of our own little shells
for comfort (I repeat: “Hell is other people.”). Contrary to what organized
religion (which, I will admit, has rarely followed its own teachings) tells us
to do, when we are left to make our own choices we gravitate towards fear and
hate rather than hope and love.
The ninth circle
So what I’m saying
is that modern life has left us to our own devices, and left home alone like
this we end up hating others. You’re probably pretty much hating me for saying all
this right now (“You can’t handle the truth!!!”), but if not, never fear
because I’m automatically hating myself for you (“We have met the enemy and he
is us”).
This is all pretty
nihilistic and self-destructive, no? It’s been my observation (and the
observation of many others) that a good chunk of us are in a spiral of despair,
and those that aren’t, well, we pity and loath them for not being so. How can
you feel good when others around you are in pain? Consider the way we react now
to joys, enthusiasms and pleasures – almost all of them are now things we tend
to not “enjoy” but pathologically binge on in wretched excess. We party to
excess, especially if we are young, doing drugs to excess and binge drinking,
almost every night of the week. We binge watch movies and television. We are
addicted to the internet. We are addicted to fitness and exercise and dieting.
We enjoy food and revel more than ever in being gourmands, while at the same
time acknowledging that we are allergic to almost all of it – we are being
poisoned by what we like best and need most. And we scorn ourselves for this,
as if we are our Puritan fathers, watching a pagan orgy. Even mild or moderate
pleasures are now looked upon with suspicion and contempt, with the word “porn”
-- once a shorthand for the empty, solitary and selfish enjoyment of lust, that
most ancient of vices – now becoming a qualifying adjective to heap disgust on
anything we love: “food porn,” “gardening porn,” “health porn,” “technology
porn,” “real estate porn,” “political porn,” “crafting porn,” “outrage porn,”…
if anything makes you a little bit happy, someone is there to remind you that
it is wrong. If it feels good, it must be irresponsible, immoral or illegal.
We are angry at
everyone and at ourselves and we are nihilistic and even deliberately self-destructive.
If we were, in the current fashion, to develop a hashtag to honestly brand
ourselves, it would not be something positive, supportive or affirming like
#jesuisCharlie, it could be #IamColumbine, #IamJamesHolmes, #IamDylanRoof. (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it
any more!”)
This is why the
internet is such a toxic place. This is why we have cyber trolls (See: “This is why we can’t have nice things”).
This is why business is hateful. This is why we hate business. This is
why government is hateful. This is why we hate the government. (See: Pew poll re government.) This is why politics is so toxic. This is
why the public is so polarized about politics. This is why we have Ferguson. This
is why we have Afghanistan. This is why we have Donald Trump. This is why one
of our two major political parties is seriously considering nominating someone
for president who they know will suck at being president and who they know much of the public will hate. This
is why much of the public already hates President Obama, though he was elected
as a symbol of “hope.” It’s why people are already talking about impeaching
Hillary Clinton, who they plan to hate. This, I guess, is why this essay keeps boiling somewhat
over-the-top.
While I would like
to end this layered descent into hell on a positive note, that, in fact, is
probably not appropriate here. What I will do is give you one more quote, this
time a poem. It is a poem that is now almost a century old, but has acquired a
certain amount of contemporary fame for being what many have recognized as an
accurate description of our moment.
It’s perhaps Irish poet William Butler Yeats’ most famous work, written during
the Irish struggle of independence and before the (now receding into history)
horrors of WWII. These are past, but Yeats believed in a cyclical theory of
history and perhaps he was
right:
The Second Coming
Turning and
turning in the widening gyre
The falcon
cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world,
The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of
innocence is drowned;
The best lack
all conviction, while the worst
Are full of
passionate intensity.
Surely some
revelation is at hand;
Surely the
Second Coming is at hand.
The Second
Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast
image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my
sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with
lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank
and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its
slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of
the indignant desert birds.
The darkness
drops again; but now I know
That twenty
centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to
nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough
beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born?
For me, this
really does feel like a prophetic vision of our time. Joseph Conrad, in “The
Heart of Darkness,” perhaps sums up this sentiment more neatly: “O, the horror,
the horror!” But Yeats keeps coming back to me: What rough beast, it’s
hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? We’re entering
the Christmas season, and it would be nice to be prepared.
In Dante’s
“Inferno”, the last, deepest circle of hell is an icy cold, empty and desolate
place, and, though I’m pretty desolate, I don’t think I’m there yet … frankly,
I would like to avoid completing the journey, though Dante's guide, Virgil,
says you have to go there in order to get to purgatory and begin the cleansing
process. What I can say here that is hopeful is this: This too shall
pass. One can hope.
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