An old friend who has spent his adult life politically engage’, as the french say, recently admitted he can barely stand to watch or read the news anymore. It is not that he’s uninterested in our evolving fate; it’s that he no longer has any faith that anything will change.
He’s clearly not alone. In the words of the old song, “nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.” And nothing can happen if nobody can agree on anything. We have reached a point that feels like entropy. Sure there is another crime or transgression, slanderous speech or tweet or lie to watch every minute of every day, but will any of our maladies be cured?
It seems wrong to avert one’s gaze from the train wreck of our civilization, but if one is helpless to stop the decline of the West, why bother caring? One can easily call to mind other times in
Type to enter text history during which there seemed to be a political, intellectual, moral, societal gridlock, logjam, bottleneck or impasse.
People my age lived through one — Vietnam. Year after year of patrols, skirmishes, fire fights, bloodshed, death, bombs, escalation, elections, stratagems, false promises, but no fundamental change, no solution, no consensus, just the grinding, repetitive, inconclusive agonizing more of the same.
My parents’ generation had its own purgatory in the prolonged Great Depression, and their parents the classic metaphor for paralysis, the trench warfare of World War I, where a generation “walked eye-deep in hell, believing in old men’s lies.” Fifty years later in MCMXIV, Larkin said, “never such innocence again.” And yet, wised-up cynicism doesn’t prevent one from being subjected to pointless folly.
We are faced with myriad pressing problems and can’t agree to do a thing. The climate changes, but we can’t agree to change the behavior that is causing it. Leaders dismantle structures to protect us or enrich us or improve our lives that took decades or centuries to create, but offer nothing to put in their place. Critics offer cries of alarm, but the erosion of our society’s underpinnings continues unchecked.
In “Waiting for the Barbarians,” Cavafy captures the mood of enervation, exhaustion, and impotence that captures an enfeebled culture.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Clearly the big problems we face are beyond the power of the average individual to affect. Rather than grapple with reality, we content ourselves with reality TV, cat videos, monster trucks, rappers, romance novels, lattes, tweets, or turn our hopes over to demagogues, charlatans and fear-mongers.
It’s understandable if we are exhausted by years of war, economic malpractice, slow-motion decline, partisan extremism, conflict, division,, disruptive change, incompetent or corrupt representation. It’s tempting to adopt the solution of the secluded monasteries of the Middle Ages, founded in solitary isolation, far from the chaos around them — or of Candide.
He was banished from a cushy life at court, conscripted, flogged, suffered through storms at sea, earthquakes, the inquisition, the loss of his mentor, separation from his beloved who is raped and enslaved, finally becomes rich only to be robbed, and at last chooses to avoid the “civilized” life of vice and leisure and withdraw from society to content himself with rustic simplicity, the labor of cultivating his own garden.
Alas, Voltaire is a satirist and after his last page it is unlikely Candide’s idyll can continue for long. There is no Arcadia for us to flee to. We can turn off the news, but dire events will continue to occur. We can try to hide, but the hacker, the lone gunman, the tax man, the plague germ, flood, famine, demagogue and disaster will keep on coming and find our hideaway.
Camus essentially argued that Candide was outmoded. Unfortunately, in the absurd world we inhabit, Sisyphus must be our role model. The villains may keep rolling boulders down upon us, but we retain a choice between suicidal surrender or “the struggle itself” which can be “enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”