Chautauqua

In his book, The Life of Reason, George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it.” Eight years after September 11, 2001, the matter is not whether we remember our past — but what we do with the memory.

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon marked the end of our innocence — or at least our insular naïveté — at least for a little while. We became citizens of the world’s vulnerability for the first time in nearly 60 years. We found grief and hope in the stories of loss and survival, happenstance and heroism, frailty and courage. We were served notice to take care of our own, while we can — at home, in the workplace, and in the world. We were taught the brutal actuality of a terrorist attack that claimed thousands of lives, destroyed billions of dollars in property, and wreaked havoc with our systems of transportation and communication, expectation and faith. Though it’s popular for us to think and be told otherwise, we continue to face a realization equally brutal, disarmingly real, and politically contentious: The continuing conflicts in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan notwithstanding — with nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran looming — such an attack could happen again. It can happen here. It did happen here.

Should this be cause for morbid apprehension or constant alarm? Clearly not. We won’t permit it. Even if the threat of another 9/11 warranted such edgy anticipation, we will not abide long-term interruption of our traditional distractions. We will not relinquish our gullibility for political promises. We will not be kept from the comfort of our daily routines, from the trivialities of our partisan quibbling, from our preoccupations with celebrity, notoriety, and the pursuit of things material and superficial. We’re Americans. We’ve earned the right to indulge ourselves in any way we see fit, thank you very much. Because we’re pragmatists, we’ll keep an eye on CNN, the newspaper headlines, and our RSS feeds. Because we’re idealists, we won’t do so at the expense of American Idol, Real Housewives, Survivor, and Dancing With The Stars.

In remembering the past, two seemingly unrelated but beautifully American questions obtain. The first was asked on Monday, September 10, 2001. At a benefit performance by the jazz pianist Marcus Roberts, a questioner asked, “What is jazz?” Marcus answered readily and succinctly, “Jazz is the history of a people expressing itself through adversity. It’s about living on the edge and maintaining sure footing.”

The second question has been asked repeatedly since the day that followed. America was attacked by religious fundamentalist terrorists (of course, we can’t call them that anymore). In the aftermath of that attack — especially in light of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the controversies they perpetuates — we continue to ask, “What do we do now?” The second answer is the same as the first, as ready and succinct: We express ourselves through adversity. We live on the edge and maintain our footing.

We do this by recognizing the luxury to which we’ve become accustomed in the United States:

• Recognizing that our right to be opinionated sarcastic, cynical, petty, superficial, materialistic, and unreflective — and to manifest all other evidence of our philosophical ennui — is an absolute luxury.
• Recognizing that our right to fritter our attention on form over substance, on the peccadilloes and proselytizing of entertainers, on the purchasing patterns of consumers, on the past weekend’s box-office receipts, and on all other evidence of our societal boredom is an absolute luxury.
• Recognizing that our right to create the demand that begets the supply of infomercials for Bowflexes, Butt Blasters, Thigh Rockers, Ab Rollers, and all other evidence of our capacity for self-absorption is an absolute luxury.
• Recognizing that our right to agonize over the isms that appear to divide us is an absolute luxury.
• Recognizing that the right to have a country free and open enough to make the attack of 9/11 possible is an absolute luxury.

Eight years after that attack — in between the latest political side-swipes and stock-market reports, as politicians dither and dodge over Gitmo, the CIA, and interrogation tactics — we maintain our footing through faith in the resolve that never leaves Americans. As we exercise our luxurious indulgences, we remain watchful over those with whom we work and share life every day.

Mindful of the past, we combine our idealistic conviction — as Americans, we believe we will prevail — with our pragmatic understanding that even idealism needs a Plan B. With neither morbid apprehension nor undue alarm, we maintain our footing through the shared though unstated conviction that — should the need arise again, as it did on 9/11 — we will do what otherwise opinionated, sarcastic, cynical, petty, superficial, gullible, materialistic, unreflective, bored, self-absorbed, divided, and free Americans do:

• We will come together in strength and determination to protect those rights and that freedom.
• We will instantly abandon our self-absorption to extend every healing hand to every hand harmed in any way by this consequence of our determination to live freely.
• We will instantly forget our boredom, reflecting only on those who need whatever help we can give, literally — be it blood, sweat, cash, comfort, or hope.
• We will instantly swap materialism for materials, sending equipment, food, clothing, and whatever else is needed on the front lines of the most immediate battle in this newly declared war.
• We will drop our luxurious pettiness to stand united and prepare ourselves for the sacrifices we will be asked to make in protecting our rights and our freedom.
• We will turn on our televisions and see citizens of every stripe, age, persuasion, and profession calling themselves Americans.
• We will save the energy it takes to be sarcastic and cynical because we know it will be needed later. While the illusions of peace might incline us to squander that energy on ourselves, we dare not cheat our fellow Americans should they need it.

L.P. Hartley said famously, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” September 11, 2001, proved the future will be equally foreign. They do things differently, quite unpredictably, and sometimes brutally there. They did something equally unpredictable and brutal here. Though politicians bid us to forget, we will remember. But we will remember in our own way.

Go ahead and call us opinionated, sarcastic, cynical, petty, superficial, gullible, materialistic, unreflective, bored, self-absorbed, divided. We are. We’ve earned every one of the absolute rights we have to be so — and to work out our problems in our own way and time. We’re free. As a free people, we express ourselves through adversity, just as we expressed ourselves through the adversity visited on us from the skies on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. And we will maintain our footing. We will. We do. We’re Americans.

If you doubt, test us.

Notwithstanding the myriad political diatribes that appear on this blog, it was never the intent of Chautauqua to comment on politics particularly or exclusively. Politics is part of a larger socio-cultural discourse — surely an inseparable part, possibly a catalytic part — but it is no more than a part.

Because of our curiosity for all things behavioral and linguistic (and the inextricable relationship of the two), we begin today a study of depression. The study is undertaken because of the proliferation of depression in the popular vernacular. This refers not to economic depression but to personal, psychological, perhaps clinical or biological depression. Economic depression may be related to other forms of depression. It may precipitate them. No one knows. At bottom, no one knows much.

The medical community can attribute biological depression to chemistry, to chemical imbalances in the brain — too much adrenaline or cortisol, not enough serotonin or norepinephrine. But it can’t explain the causes of the imbalances.  Are they genetic?  Are they psychologically predisposed responses to particular circumstances? Are they caused by the lack of constructive contemporary outlets for our hard-wired fight-or-flight mechanisms? With nowhere to run and no one to fight, maybe we hit internal walls that leave us feeling helpless, powerless, insignificant, wanting, unfulfilled, terrified, haunted.

Twenty years ago, the comedian, Louie Anderson, wrote a book called Dear Dad. Rather than synopsize, we’ll simply encourage you to buy the book. But we will offer this excerpt as a starting point for our discourse on depression:

I have this theory that all we deal with in life is loss. We lose the protective comfort of the womb. We lose our mother’s breast. We lose the right to mess our pants. We lose friends, teachers, relatives. We lose our hair, our teeth, and our youth. We keep losing all these things and never get them back, but we never really learn how to deal with the loss. We never say that it hurts, really hurts, and so we spend the rest of our lives trying to make up for it, holding on tightly to things that we should really let go of.

Given the prevalence of depression in Western societies — and notwithstanding our predilections for quick fixes, easy outs, and the pharmaceutical possibilities for feeling nothing at all — it’s as possible as anything else that our inability to accept cycles and the natural course of aging work against us. Perhaps our preoccupations with youth, vitality, and glamor render us unable to accept the realities of impermanence, the inevitability of loss, and the impossibility of stasis. Maybe because aging necessitates decline, we refuse to accept the passing of our connections to popular culture. Maybe the preoccupation with being young causes us to overlook the treasures of aging — wisdom, nobility, self-knowledge. Maybe all of our material, physical preoccupations are capable of inducing our failure to embrace the spiritual center of the human condition. So, we fight the inexorable and the inevitable futilely. And we do so at the expense of our psychological and emotional natures and well-being.

This denial of our maturation and our spirituality — and its consequences — is neither a new idea nor a new practice. In his invaluable treatise on world mythology, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, written in 1949, Joseph Campbell noted this:

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may very well be that the high incidence of neuroticism amongst ourselves follows from the decline among us to such effective spiritual aid.  We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood. In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young … [but] looking back at what had promised to be our own unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure, all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and woman have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization.

Perhaps, then, the price of modern civilization is depression. As we invent ever more modes and methods of communication, so we become less communal. As we create ever more electronic connections, so we abandon our human ones. As we separate, so we fail to share. As we worship the physical, so withers the spirit. As we defy rites of passage, so we fight our inevitable passing. As we create more fears to fight, so we forsake joy.

Please share your thoughts. Your stories will help connect us. Please join this Chautauqua.