The Melodrama
Much of our lives become embroiled in and defined by our obsessions with things “fleeting and failing,” but we can never silence the still, small voice within us that tells us to seek for truth and meaning beyond the ephemera. For unless we can make the distinction between those things, we are doomed to misery. Americans are unhappy, and the more they concern themselves with inconsequential things and regard the truly consequential things as outside their interest, the more depressed they will become. We have not only become strangers to one another, we have become strangers to ourselves.
Language obscures and reveals our meanings, and thus ourselves. Consider the following common exchange:
"How are you?"
"I am fine (or well, or good [sic], or ok ...)"
The first question is shorthand, and the responder’s complicity in the shorthand evinces a hiding of the truth not only from the person addressing him, but from himself. In full, the question posed reads "How are you doing?" where "doing" modifies "you" adjectivally, as a claim about our present state.
But what if we understood "doing" as a verb? Not only the whole sense of the question would change, but it would alter the nature of the "you" under discussion. We’d be asked about our state of being, forced not only to reflect on how we are engaging the world, but pushed to ask about the "I" so engaged. Who am "I," and how am I to be in the world? Am I series of dissipated moments, as Nietzsche suggested, stretched across an artificial continuum whose center is a thinly stretched membrane? Am I a static substance, as Plato might have argued?
And how are we? What if we were to respond adverbally: "I am, happily." Or, "I am, miserably." "I am, fitfully." Or, "I am, selfishly." Responding in such a way would place ourselves and how we are in the world to the forefront of our thinking and our interaction with others, but unleash a host of other problems. We'd have to face ourselves for what we are, and we'd be obliged to know something about our condition. The sad truth our greatest thinkers discovered is that neither of these options appeal to us. Ignorance is bliss.
Any philosopher worth his salt has understood this. Plato identified our condition as an irresolvable tension generated by being finite creatures who thirst for the infinite. Our grasp would always exceed our reach. He posited the idea that we have eternal souls as a way of buttressing our anxiety over the fleeting morass of life and the flux of reality. If we could anchor our souls in an unknown but benevolent and eternal transcendence, we could bear the not-knowing of our ultimate destiny as well as the ephemeral nature of our short lives. "Who of us," among the living and dying, said Socrates at his death in his final moment of irony, "takes the better path is known but to god."
For Saint Augustine, the perennial restlessness of the heart resulted not only from its ignorance, but because it always attached itself to the wrong things. Our cravings create confusion about what will satisfy them. What do we seek? The restless quest was identified by Augustine at the beginning of The Confessions. We seek God, who is peace itself; or more accurately, we seek God seeking us. We seek one mystery - God - with another mystery - ourselves. “Men go abroad,” he wrote, “to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.” We are mysterious to ourselves, he thought, because we are made in the image of God, who is mystery.
St. Augustine insisted on our soli loquia, we speak within ourselves. He looked into himself not to find himself, but to find God. He was at sea with God, with God and the soul alone. He prayed: “Teach me how to come to Thee! I have nothing but the will. I know nothing but that the fleeting and failing should be spurned, the certain and eternal sought. This I do, Father, for this is all I know: but how to make my way to Thee I know not. Do Thou suggest it, make it plain, equip me for the journey! If they who take refuge in Thee, find Thee by faith, give me faith! If by virtue, give me virtue! If by knowledge, give me knowledge!”
Cor ad Cor Loqitur, said Cardinal Newman: heart speaks unto heart. Abyssus abyssum invocat: “Abyss calls unto abyss,” said Augustine. In his Commentary on the Psalms he noted that the soul and God are both “abysses that cannot be reached or comprehended.” “Man shall come unto a deep heart, and God shall be exalted.” In the mystery of God’s love, the dispersed self is gathered into its own oneness. All other loves divide and wound the soul; only God’s love binds and heals. For Augustine, the gap between us and God and its mysterious breach is not only mirrored in the distance that separates us and keeps us from understanding one another, but is even more pronounced within ourselves, for we are "an abyss so deep we must forever remain a mystery to ourselves." The prospects for knowing how to be in such a world are grim for such a creature. If we are to be, freely, our freedom will always bump up against restraints and distortions, and these will provide us an endless supply of frustrations and anxieties.
At the cusp of the move from "the closed system to the infinite universe," Pascal stripped away the divine residue of our condition and left us as creatures stretched between the two abysses of our not-having-been and our not-again-to-be. We are, anxiously. We are, desperately. We are, truthfully ("Too much and too little wine. Given him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same"). The truth? We are "lost in this remote corner of nature" and "trapped in the little cell in which [we] find [ourselves] lodged," forced to face our insignificance. We are "a mean between Nothing and Everything" who are incapable of seeing the Nothing from which we emerged and the Infinite in which we are swallowed whole. Our insignificance is matched by our incomprehension.
"This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation on which to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses."Thrown into this perilous state, we live anxiously, desperately seeking ways to enlarge and anchor the lonely heart that feels its insignificance and could alter that feeling if only it could plant itself and grow. But how, and where? Pascal: "He wants to be great, but he sees himself small. He wants to be happy, but he sees himself miserable. He wants to be perfect, but he sees himself full of imperfections. He wants to be the object of love and esteem among men, but he sees that his faults merit only their hatred and contempt." As mysterious and forlorn as our place in the infinite universe is, it pales to our place in the eyes of others and ourselves. The universe does not judge, it is vastly indifferent. But we judge, as do our fellows, and their judgments carry not the sting of indifference but the lash of condemnation.
Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is a work of remarkable genius, but not for the reasons usually given. It is neither an apology for democracy nor a paean to America. The author wrote the book in a "state of religious terror" when he contemplated the advent of the democratic age that "it would be neither wise nor possible to prevent." The arrival of the equality of conditions brought with it a flattening of the social realm and a leveling of human types, reducing the social state to an analogue of the Pascalian universe. We now lived in a mass democracy where we felt powerless and insignificant (our act of citizenship now largely reduced to being one voice among 150 million), and faced with a massive centralized bureaucracy that was indifferent to our individuality.
Democracy filled Tocqueville with dread because of the way it transformed everything it touched, including ourselves. I am, democratically. I am, insignificantly. Reduced to the mass of equal, alike, atomized beings, we come to regard ourselves as replaceable and inconsequential. This realization creates a kind of madness in us, a tension driven by resignation and rebellion. We move outward in desperate efforts to assert ourselves, to seek a little transcendence, and then we retreat into ever smaller realms where we can experience comfort and repose in the churning sea of human indifference. The public realm becomes a competition for status and material well-being, and the home becomes a haven for the restless souls that never achieve.
We are wholly persons but divided selves, navigating the nether regions of a whirlpool of social activity that constantly leaves us disoriented and feeling as if we are the butt of a joke. Tocqueville believed that neither the fig leaves of shame nor the garlands of victory graced our age. We were destined to be forever uncertain about where we stood. Our imagination directed itself both inward and outward, seeing a conspiracy of impersonal forces that will our destruction. We then live in a melodrama where we know we are fated to mess up our lives and those of others, only knowing not exactly how that will happen. Finding no public worthy of our attention, we retreat into relationships as a realm of freedom. But even in these relationships we either consume each other like panthers or cuddle each other as teddy bears. It all becomes sentimentalized or brutalized. We live by melodrama. We’ll turn each other’s pain to our advantage by reminding others how the tragedy makes us “feel,” augmented by any personal knowledge we might have of the victims.
The sense that there is "something missing" is built into the condition of a democratic man, precisely because his restless heart would never be able to find an anchor. Faith had always provided this, Tocqueville believed, but in democracies, even religion would be transformed and made merely therapeutic. Deep down, we know we need to be fixed and we dream of being perfected. "If only" this or that condition or quality could be altered, if only we could find a little transcendence, we could be pulled out of the miasma of a democratic society that in its ceaseless turnover leaves us perpetually disoriented, while the uniformity of democratic life leaves us feeling always replaceable. We could be, somebody? We could be, a little less crazy?
Faced with the indifference of a mass democracy, Tocqueville believed we would turn increasingly inward to find our anchoring point. Becoming too inward, however, genuinely knowing ourselves and seeing our inner-darkness, would bring with it moral condemnation. Not finding a way to absolve ourselves, we would seek validation outside ourselves, signaling our virtues to others whose approval could be internalized and silence our doubts. But the project could only work if those others didn’t know us well, for it is difficult to fool friends and lovers, and thus our moral energies are dissipated in ever larger and more non-descript circles. We become global precisely at the moment we become most isolated. Both leave us feeling exhausted and powerless.
Democratic man, isolated and lonely, retains a desire for unity. Unable to find it in the competitive and churning seas of politics and markets, we increasingly seek it in relationships, placing on them exclusively the incredible burden of making us seen and known and understood, and thus making us whole. But our unstable hearts seek other unstable hearts, meaning we are stuck toying with each other. Having revealed ourselves incapable of intimacy, we seek a place that is both refuge and playground. Underneath our engagements, however, resides the anxiety that we might be seen and known and understood for who we really are, and thus understanding could never aspire to love.
Tocqueville: "And they are right to feel this fear, for in ages of democracy all things are unstable, but the most unstable of all is the human heart." Because we are looking for a stable mooring, we need to strip away the social accretions that render them routine, habitual, and conforming. Sex offers itself as a way what’s left of our free self can achieve some immediacy with another free self. Even here, however, anxiety slips in. Is heart speaking unto heart, or are we engaged in a powerful performance of shared powerlessness? Do we actually feel more alive, or does each effort deaden us just a little more? Like Oscar Wilde we may soon find ourselves "feasting with panthers," engaged in a dangerous play where the danger is precisely the thing we crave. But that threatens to consume us (the theme of the movie Cat People), so we domesticate the cat, we make it safe and fill it with the melodrama of our imaginations. The other we share our bed with is either a ravenous panther or a domesticated teddy bear. It's all either nihilism or kitsch, but never rises to art, and we never become the artists of being alive and thus, Tocqueville worried, never the fully free characters that would make democracy work.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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