Tao Te Ching & Despair Work: part one
Tao Te Ching
by LAO TSU
Translation by Gia Fu Feng
and Jane English
Twenty-Two
Yield and overcome;
Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.
Therefore wise men embrace the one
And set an example to all.
Not putting on a display,
They shine forth.
Not justifying themselves,
They are distinguished.
Not boasting,
They receive recognition.
Not bragging,
They never falter.
They do not quarrel,
So no one quarrels with them.
Therefore the ancients say, "Yield and overcome."
Is that an empty saying?
Be really whole,
And all things will come to you.
~~
In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Despair Work
Joanna Macy
First published in Evolutionary Blues Summer/Fall'81
Reprinted from Speaking Out on the threat of Nuclear War: a practical guide prepared by the Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility 1982
A psychiatrist, studying attitudes about nuclear weapons among persons in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently found that almost all participants in her research considered nuclear war to be likely, if not inevitable. Everyone taking part in Dr. Carol Wolman's study believe it would be an unparalled disaster, a disaster they do not wish to survive and that would probably extinguish life on earth. Most of them also say that they found the prospect too painful to confront personally or acknowledge publicly. Admittedly foreseeing the very possible extinction of our culture, their predominant response is not to cry out or ring alarms. It is to go silent, to go numb.
What is noteworthy here is not that people are feeling despair; despair is well merited by the hair-trigger machinery of mass death we continue to create and serve. What is noteworthy is the extent to which Americans are hiding this despair from themselves and each other. If we are, as Arthur Koestler suggested, an age of anxiety, we are also an age adept at sweeping this anxiety under the rug. My work, as a college teacher, meditation instructor, and organizer for social change, confirms Dr. Wolman's findings: that we as a society are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and an inability to acknowledge it.
Our time bombards us with signals of distress -- of ecological destruction, waning resources, social breakdown, and uncontrolled nuclear proliferation. Activist, who would arouse us to the fact that our survival is at stake, decry public apathy. The cause of this apathy, I would suggest, is not mere indifference. It derives also from dread. It stems from a fear of confronting the despair that lurks subliminally beneath the tenor of life-as-usual. A dread of what is happening to our future moves there on the fringes of awareness, too deep for most of us to name, too fearsome to face. Sometimes it manifests in dreams of mass destruction-- and is exorcised in the morning jog and shower or in the public fantasies of disaster entertainment. But it is rarely acknowledged or expressed directly. Because of social taboos against despair and because of fear of pain, it is kept at bay.
The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurrent response, produces a partial numbing of the psyche. Dr. Wolman noted a striking absence of strong affect in the groups she studied; even when averring the likelihood of holocaust, expressions of anger or terror were muted, as if a nerve had been cut.
The refusal of feeling takes a heavy toll. The toll is not only an impoverishment of emotional and sensory life- the flowers dimmer and less fragrant, loves less ecstatic. This psychic numbing also impedes the capacity to process and respond to information. The energy spent in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies. Further more, the fear of despair can erect an invisible screen, selectively filtering out anxiety-provoking data. In a world where organisms require feedback in order to adapt and survive, this is suicidal. Now, just when we most urgently need to measure the effects of our acts, attention and curiosity slacken- as if preparing already for the Big Sleep. The alarms rung by protesters and prophets often only intensify this resistance by anesthesia. In the process, many of us, doggedly attending to business-as-usual, deny both our despair and our ability to cope with it.
Despair cannot be banished by sermons on "positive thinking" or injections of optimism. Like grief it must be worked through. This means it must be named, and validated as a healthy human response to the planetary situation we find ourselves in. Faced and experienced, its power can be used- as the frozen defenses of the psyche thaw and new energies are released. Something analogous to grief-work is in order. "Despair-work," as I call it, is different from grief-work in that its aim is not acceptance of loss- indeed, the "loss" has not yet occurred and is hardly to be "accepted." But it is similar in the dynamics unleashed by the willingness to acknowledge, feel, and express inner pain. Work with myself and with others has convinced me that this is the case: we can always come to terms with apocalyptic anxieties in ways that which are integrative and liberating, opening awareness not only to planetary distress, but also to the hope inherent in our own capacity to change.
Ingredients of Despair
Whether or not we choose to accord them serious attention, we are barraged by data that render questionable, for the first time in recorded history, the survival of our culture and our species, and even of our planet as a viable home for conscious life. These warning signals prefigure, to those who do take them seriously, probabilities of apocalypse that are mind-boggling in scope. While varied, each scenario presents its own relentless logic. Poisoned by oil spills, sludge and plutonium, the seas are dying; when the plankton disappear (in thirty years at present pollution rates, says Jean-Jacques Cousteau), we will suffocate from lack of oxygen. OR carbon dioxide from industrial and automotive combustion will saturate the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect that will melt the polar icecaps. OR by radioactive poisoning from nuclear reactors and their wastes, already nearing epidemic proportions, plagues of cancer will decimate future populations cause fearful mutations in the survivors. OR deforestation and desertification of the planet, now rapidly advancing, will produce giant dustbowls, famines beyond imagining. The probability of each of these perils is amply documented by scientific studies (many of which are summarized in Lester Brown's The 29th Day, 1978, and the Global 2000 Report to the President, 1980). The list of such scenarios could continue, the most immediate and likely stemming from the use of nuclear bombs, by terrorists or super-powers. That eventuality presents vistas of such horror that, as is said, "the survivors will envy the dead."
We read such portents against the sober backdrop of recent history. In a century which already features a hundred million human-inflicted deaths and where nations consider their own populations expendable, we live, as Robert Rubenstein says, in "a new moral universe." An era so dehumanized as to produce technically efficient death camps now permits murder for profit- in the admittedly lethal processing of uranium, mercury, asbestos and other killers. Not only has our vaunted technology intensified human destructiveness beyond measure; it has also buttressed it with blind bureaucratic machinery unafraid, as Amnesty International testifies, to use torture on a scale perhaps unsurpassed in history. The collective lunacy this represents saps confidence that those in power will have the wisdom, and compassion for the future, to take the steps necessary to avert destruction of our biosphere.
I do not wish to seem overdramatic but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary-General, that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next ten years, I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control.
U Thant (1969)
Living in such a world, anxieties and dreads assail us- and that is what I mean by despair. Despair, in this context, is not a macabre certainty of doom, nor a pathological condition of depression and futility. Rather, as it is being experienced by increasing numbers of folks who, by all conventional measures, are competent and even successful members of society, it is the loss of the assumption that the species will inevitably pull through. It represents a genuine accession to the possibility that this planetary experiment will fail the curtain rung down, the show over.
The particular scenario, whether holocaust, suffocation, poisoning, makes little difference to the sensation when a likely and unavoidable end to human existence is seriously entertained. When they break through the censorship we tend to impose on them, these sensations can be intense and physical. Judy, who left her career to work as a full-time anti-nuclear organizer, says her onslaughts of grief come as a cold, heavy weight on her chest and a sense of her body breaking. Mine, which began two years ago after an all-day symposium on threats to our biosphere, were sudden and wrenching. I would be at my desk, alone in my study translating a Buddhist text, and the next moment would find me on the floor, curled like a fetus and shaking. In company I was more controlled; but even then, in those early months unused to despair, I would be caught off guard. A like from Shakespeare or a Bach phrase would pierce with pain as I found my self wondering it would be heard, before fading out forever in the galactic silences.
At the prospect of the extinction of a civilization, feelings of grief and horror are not surprising. We lack currency to express them, though, for the prospect is new under the sun. Our heritage from the past provides few symbols for what we now experience. This despair is not fear of one’s own death; it is other than the age-old poignancy of human transience and mortality, the “golden grove unleaving” of which poets sing. These gentle aches of generations are, as Denise Levertov writes, “the old fears, antique anxieties.” Of a different order is that “hope that is fading from us,” we who had “certitude of grasses waving upon the earth when we return to fruitful dust.”
If there is time to warn you,
if you believed there shall be
never again a green blade in the crevice,
luminous eyes in rockshadow:
if you were warned and believed
the warning
would your beauty
break into spears of fire,
fire to turn fire, a wall
of refusal…?
The loss of the “green blade in the crevice,” that is the sense that life’s song might not continue beyond the moments we now harvest, that is the despair. But instead of rising up to make of it a “wall of refusal,” we tend to hide it from ourselves and each other. Why? The reasons, I think, are both social and psychological- and underlying both is a dysfunctional idea of what we are as persons.
Symptoms and Suppressions
In India at a leprosarium I met a young woman, a mother of four. Her case was advanced, the doctors pointed out, because for so long she had hidden its signs. Fearing ostracism and banishment, she had covered her sores with her sari, pulled the shoulder drape around so no one would see. In a similar fashion did I later hide despair for our world, cloaking it like a shameful disease- and so, I have learned, do others.
In a culture committed to the American Dream, it is hard to own up to despair. Wolman’s interviewees reported experiencing social pressures against the expression of their apprehensions. This is still the land of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, where an unflagging optimism is taken as means and measure of success. As commercials for products and campaigns for politicians attest, the happy and admirable person smiles a lot. The feelings of depression, loneliness, and anxiety, to which the thinking animal has always been heir, carry here an added burden: one feels bad about feeling bad.
One can even feel guilty about it. As Daniel Boorstin noted, failure of home, in a country which was built and nurtured on utopian expectations and which “voraciously demands stronger and deeper faith in it,” can seem un-American, feel like betrayal.
Even among religious folk, whose constructs of belief include suffering and crucifixion, despair can appear as a lapse of faith. At a vigil before a demonstration at the Pentagon against nuclear weapons, Daniel Berrigan spoke of hope. The necessity of hope in a new Jerusalem to carry us through. Others chimed in, affirming their belief in this vision and their gratitude for it. After a pause, a young man, among those participating in the week’s civil disobedience actions, spoke up falteringly. He questioned whether hope was really prerequisite, because, and he admitted this with difficulty, he was not feeling it. Even among friends committed to the same goal, it was hard for him (and brave of him, I thought) to admit despair. It was clear he feared he would be misunderstood, taken as cowardly or cynical- a fear validated by the response of some present.
“There is nothing more feared and less faced,” writes Jesuit essayist, William Lynch, “than the possibility of despair.” This is one reason, he says, why the mentally ill are so thoroughly isolated from the well- or why, one may add, expressions of anguish for the future are considered a breach of etiquette. Yet, he says, “hopelessness is a more usual and more human feeling than we are wont to admit.”
Despair is resisted so tenaciously because it represents a loss of control, an admission of powerlessness. Our culture dodges it by demanding instant solutions when problems are raised. My political science colleagues in France ridiculed this, I recall, as an endemic trait of the American personality. “You people prescribe before you find the diagnosis,” they would say. “Let the difficulties reveal themselves first before rushing in with a ready-made solution or else you will not understand them.” To do this would require that one view a stressful situation without the psychic security of knowing if and how it can be solved- in other words, a willingness to suffer a little.
"Don't come to me with aproblem unless you have a solution." That tacit injunction, operative even in public policy-making, further inhibits people from expressing feeling of despair. It rings like my mother's words to me as a child, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."
Our culture then discourages the acknowledgement of despair for the future. In the experience of Dr. Wolman’s interviewees, this inhibition amounts to a social taboo. In explaining their silence and numbness over nuclear weapons, they pointed out that those who break this taboo are considered “crazy,” or at least “depressed and depressing.” Many of my colleagues and I in the anti-nuclear movement have experienced similar inhibitions in expressing our preoccupation with long-term, lethal radioactive poisoning of the planet. No one wants a Cassandra around or welcomes a Banquo at the feast. Nor indeed are such roles enjoyable to play. When the prospect of collective suicide first hit me- and I know well the day and hour my defenses against this despair suddenly collapsed- I felt there was no one to whom in my grief I could turn. If there were- and indeed there were, for I have loving intelligent friends and family- what is there to say? Do I want them to feel this horror too? What can be said without casting a pall, or without seeming to ask for unacceptable words of comfort and cheer? So, as I have since found others have done, I shook and wept in solitude and continued in public to be, fairly recognizably, the same up-beat person as before.
To feel despair in such a cultural setting brings on a sense of isolation. The psychic dissonance can be so acute as to seem to border on madness. The distance between one’s inklings of apocalypse and the tenor of business-as-usual is so great that, though a person may respect his own cognitive reading of the signs, his affective response is frequently that is its he, not the society, that is insane.
Psychotherapy, as it is predominantly practiced, has offered little help for coping with these feelings, and indeed has often compounded the problem. Most practitioners have trouble crediting the notion that concerns for the general welfare might be genuine, and acute enough to cause distress. Assuming that all our drives are ego-centered, they tend to treat expressions of this distress reductionistically, as manifestations of private neurosis. To illustrate from my own case, which is far from unique: deep dismay over the destruction of the wilderness was seen as fear of my own libido (which the bulldozers were taken to symbolize); painful preoccupation with U.S. bombings of Vietnam was interpreted as an unwholesome hangover of Puritan guilt. Such “therapy,” of course, only intensifies the sense of isolation and craziness despair can bring, while inhibiting its recognition and expression.
In this regard many members of the psychiatric profession resemble Job’s comforters. Just as those pious, well-meaning friends could only assume that Job’s sufferings were caused by his sin, so most therapists would reduce despair to private pathology. In both cases the distress in question is cut and trimmed to fit the contours of meaning that society delimits for suffering.
At a recent conference of the Association for Humanistic Psychology I met Maxine, a veteran of the human potential movement. On the day after a talk in which I mentioned in passing the idea of despair-work, she shared with me her sense of relief at hearing these comments. She said she had been wondering why she did not feel better, since she had been freed-up, stimulated, relaxed, self-realized and self-actualized from just about every type of growth therapy going. With a kind of sober relief she could recognize now the social roots of her feelings of anxiety, accepting and validating the fact that she felt “at a loss” about her world and her children’s future in it. Although this recognition produced no solutions to global problems, she said she felt quieter, more centered and more conscious.
“I know a therapist,” writes William Lynch, “who abandoned the treatment of a particular schizophrenic in despair, only to find that his acknowledgement of despair had cured the patient! In acknowledging some of his own hopelessness he had…helped to relieve the patient of an impossible burden, the burden of having nothing but beautiful feelings.”
Joan, a Jungian analyst, tells of the increasing incidence in her patients of dreams of apocalypse. Likening them to C. G. Jung’s dream on the eve of the first World War, when he beheld Europe bathed in blood, she says these current ones are filled with symbols of mass death and planetary destruction. Such dreams, though painful, can get us in touch with the nature of present despair. Of a different order are the fantasies of apocalypse offered in mass entertainment today.
Now at least we can hear voices from within the psychiatric profession itself, which relieve us of that “impossible burden.” Dr. Rollo May, in a 1980 symposium on “The Recovery of Wholeness,” said, “The psychoanalytic response ought to be…our own absorption of the degree of despair that is present. The problem is our denial of the situation… but our chance for survival is nil unless we can face the despair without denial.” Dr. John Mack, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, became a member of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on the nuclear danger. From his own personal experience of “intense resistance to experiencing the nuclear danger as it really is,” he concludes that, “we must seek to embrace the terror and experience its validity, for the immediacy of nuclear death is real…Only when we can honestly contemplate this horror can we begin to do something about it. Until we do, it ‘has’ us…”
The biggest money-makers in the film industry today, as Andrée Conrad points out in Disaster and the American Imagination,” are movies that feature cataclysmic events and violent mass death. Earthquakes, rampaging sharks and killer bees, erupting volcanos and towering infernos doomed craft in air and sea, loaded with panicked passengers, vie in imageries of terror. Contrived with technical brilliance, these films draw large crowds and large profits. Their appeal, indeed their fascination, stems from an inchoate but pervasive sense of doom in the American public. The scenarios they present give structure and outlet to unformulated fears of apocalypse, and in so doing provide catharsis. But it is a dangerous catharsis, Ms. Conrad observes.
Hooking our anxieties onto isolated and unlikely emergencies, frequently handled with technological heroics, these entertainments give their audience, sitting safely ensconced in a comfortable theater, the illusion of having dealt with what is bothering them. On fictitious, improbably themes they air and exercise our dread, while inuring us to the prospects of mass death and raising our horror threshold another notch. They blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality, making the next day’s news seem like more of the same- alarms to be passively watched till the credits appear and we can stop for a beer on our way home to bed.
These entertainments constitute a new version of what Geoffrey Gorer in the ‘50s called our “pornography of death.” Just as the repression of sex in our puritanically-conditioned culture produces debased expressions of it, so is our repression of the reality of personal death released in fascination with sadistic violence. By analogous reasoning, disaster films can be seen as pornographies of despair. In the same way X-rated “adult” flicks cheapen the sexual hungers they trade on, the towering infernos and devouring jaws dull and misdirect our need to do genuine despair-work.
This work is needed because our culture makes it hard to get in touch with the genuine dimensions of our despair, and because until we do, our power of creative response to planetary crisis will be crippled. Until we can grieve for our planet and its future inhabitants, we cannot fully feel or enact our love for them. Such grief is frequently suppressed, not only because it is socially awkward. It is also denied because it is both hard to credit and very painful. At the root of both these inhibitions lies a dysfunctional notion of the self. It is the notion of the self as an isolated and fragile entity. Such a self has no reason to weep for the unseen and the unborn, and such a self, if it did, might shatter with pain and futility.
So long as we see ourselves a[s] essentially separate, competitive and ego-identified beings, it is difficult to respect the validity of our social despair, deriving as it does from interconnectedness. Both our capacity to grieve for others and our power to cope with this grief spring from the great matrix of relationships in which we have our being. Just as our pain is more than private, so is our resilience. We are, as open systems, sustained by flows of energy and information that extend beyond the reach of conscious ego. This can become evident to us as we confront despair and work through it.
[ part two , part three, part four, references and citations,
Table of Contents]
Comments, if you can make them, are essential. This is hard, hard, and so necessary. I love you all for even considering it.
by LAO TSU
Translation by Gia Fu Feng
and Jane English
Twenty-Two
Yield and overcome;
Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.
Therefore wise men embrace the one
And set an example to all.
Not putting on a display,
They shine forth.
Not justifying themselves,
They are distinguished.
Not boasting,
They receive recognition.
Not bragging,
They never falter.
They do not quarrel,
So no one quarrels with them.
Therefore the ancients say, "Yield and overcome."
Is that an empty saying?
Be really whole,
And all things will come to you.
~~
In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Despair Work
Joanna Macy
First published in Evolutionary Blues Summer/Fall'81
Reprinted from Speaking Out on the threat of Nuclear War: a practical guide prepared by the Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility 1982
A psychiatrist, studying attitudes about nuclear weapons among persons in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently found that almost all participants in her research considered nuclear war to be likely, if not inevitable. Everyone taking part in Dr. Carol Wolman's study believe it would be an unparalled disaster, a disaster they do not wish to survive and that would probably extinguish life on earth. Most of them also say that they found the prospect too painful to confront personally or acknowledge publicly. Admittedly foreseeing the very possible extinction of our culture, their predominant response is not to cry out or ring alarms. It is to go silent, to go numb.
What is noteworthy here is not that people are feeling despair; despair is well merited by the hair-trigger machinery of mass death we continue to create and serve. What is noteworthy is the extent to which Americans are hiding this despair from themselves and each other. If we are, as Arthur Koestler suggested, an age of anxiety, we are also an age adept at sweeping this anxiety under the rug. My work, as a college teacher, meditation instructor, and organizer for social change, confirms Dr. Wolman's findings: that we as a society are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and an inability to acknowledge it.
Our time bombards us with signals of distress -- of ecological destruction, waning resources, social breakdown, and uncontrolled nuclear proliferation. Activist, who would arouse us to the fact that our survival is at stake, decry public apathy. The cause of this apathy, I would suggest, is not mere indifference. It derives also from dread. It stems from a fear of confronting the despair that lurks subliminally beneath the tenor of life-as-usual. A dread of what is happening to our future moves there on the fringes of awareness, too deep for most of us to name, too fearsome to face. Sometimes it manifests in dreams of mass destruction-- and is exorcised in the morning jog and shower or in the public fantasies of disaster entertainment. But it is rarely acknowledged or expressed directly. Because of social taboos against despair and because of fear of pain, it is kept at bay.
The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurrent response, produces a partial numbing of the psyche. Dr. Wolman noted a striking absence of strong affect in the groups she studied; even when averring the likelihood of holocaust, expressions of anger or terror were muted, as if a nerve had been cut.
The refusal of feeling takes a heavy toll. The toll is not only an impoverishment of emotional and sensory life- the flowers dimmer and less fragrant, loves less ecstatic. This psychic numbing also impedes the capacity to process and respond to information. The energy spent in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies. Further more, the fear of despair can erect an invisible screen, selectively filtering out anxiety-provoking data. In a world where organisms require feedback in order to adapt and survive, this is suicidal. Now, just when we most urgently need to measure the effects of our acts, attention and curiosity slacken- as if preparing already for the Big Sleep. The alarms rung by protesters and prophets often only intensify this resistance by anesthesia. In the process, many of us, doggedly attending to business-as-usual, deny both our despair and our ability to cope with it.
Despair cannot be banished by sermons on "positive thinking" or injections of optimism. Like grief it must be worked through. This means it must be named, and validated as a healthy human response to the planetary situation we find ourselves in. Faced and experienced, its power can be used- as the frozen defenses of the psyche thaw and new energies are released. Something analogous to grief-work is in order. "Despair-work," as I call it, is different from grief-work in that its aim is not acceptance of loss- indeed, the "loss" has not yet occurred and is hardly to be "accepted." But it is similar in the dynamics unleashed by the willingness to acknowledge, feel, and express inner pain. Work with myself and with others has convinced me that this is the case: we can always come to terms with apocalyptic anxieties in ways that which are integrative and liberating, opening awareness not only to planetary distress, but also to the hope inherent in our own capacity to change.
Ingredients of Despair
Whether or not we choose to accord them serious attention, we are barraged by data that render questionable, for the first time in recorded history, the survival of our culture and our species, and even of our planet as a viable home for conscious life. These warning signals prefigure, to those who do take them seriously, probabilities of apocalypse that are mind-boggling in scope. While varied, each scenario presents its own relentless logic. Poisoned by oil spills, sludge and plutonium, the seas are dying; when the plankton disappear (in thirty years at present pollution rates, says Jean-Jacques Cousteau), we will suffocate from lack of oxygen. OR carbon dioxide from industrial and automotive combustion will saturate the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect that will melt the polar icecaps. OR by radioactive poisoning from nuclear reactors and their wastes, already nearing epidemic proportions, plagues of cancer will decimate future populations cause fearful mutations in the survivors. OR deforestation and desertification of the planet, now rapidly advancing, will produce giant dustbowls, famines beyond imagining. The probability of each of these perils is amply documented by scientific studies (many of which are summarized in Lester Brown's The 29th Day, 1978, and the Global 2000 Report to the President, 1980). The list of such scenarios could continue, the most immediate and likely stemming from the use of nuclear bombs, by terrorists or super-powers. That eventuality presents vistas of such horror that, as is said, "the survivors will envy the dead."
We read such portents against the sober backdrop of recent history. In a century which already features a hundred million human-inflicted deaths and where nations consider their own populations expendable, we live, as Robert Rubenstein says, in "a new moral universe." An era so dehumanized as to produce technically efficient death camps now permits murder for profit- in the admittedly lethal processing of uranium, mercury, asbestos and other killers. Not only has our vaunted technology intensified human destructiveness beyond measure; it has also buttressed it with blind bureaucratic machinery unafraid, as Amnesty International testifies, to use torture on a scale perhaps unsurpassed in history. The collective lunacy this represents saps confidence that those in power will have the wisdom, and compassion for the future, to take the steps necessary to avert destruction of our biosphere.
I do not wish to seem overdramatic but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary-General, that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next ten years, I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control.
U Thant (1969)
Living in such a world, anxieties and dreads assail us- and that is what I mean by despair. Despair, in this context, is not a macabre certainty of doom, nor a pathological condition of depression and futility. Rather, as it is being experienced by increasing numbers of folks who, by all conventional measures, are competent and even successful members of society, it is the loss of the assumption that the species will inevitably pull through. It represents a genuine accession to the possibility that this planetary experiment will fail the curtain rung down, the show over.
The particular scenario, whether holocaust, suffocation, poisoning, makes little difference to the sensation when a likely and unavoidable end to human existence is seriously entertained. When they break through the censorship we tend to impose on them, these sensations can be intense and physical. Judy, who left her career to work as a full-time anti-nuclear organizer, says her onslaughts of grief come as a cold, heavy weight on her chest and a sense of her body breaking. Mine, which began two years ago after an all-day symposium on threats to our biosphere, were sudden and wrenching. I would be at my desk, alone in my study translating a Buddhist text, and the next moment would find me on the floor, curled like a fetus and shaking. In company I was more controlled; but even then, in those early months unused to despair, I would be caught off guard. A like from Shakespeare or a Bach phrase would pierce with pain as I found my self wondering it would be heard, before fading out forever in the galactic silences.
At the prospect of the extinction of a civilization, feelings of grief and horror are not surprising. We lack currency to express them, though, for the prospect is new under the sun. Our heritage from the past provides few symbols for what we now experience. This despair is not fear of one’s own death; it is other than the age-old poignancy of human transience and mortality, the “golden grove unleaving” of which poets sing. These gentle aches of generations are, as Denise Levertov writes, “the old fears, antique anxieties.” Of a different order is that “hope that is fading from us,” we who had “certitude of grasses waving upon the earth when we return to fruitful dust.”
If there is time to warn you,
if you believed there shall be
never again a green blade in the crevice,
luminous eyes in rockshadow:
if you were warned and believed
the warning
would your beauty
break into spears of fire,
fire to turn fire, a wall
of refusal…?
The loss of the “green blade in the crevice,” that is the sense that life’s song might not continue beyond the moments we now harvest, that is the despair. But instead of rising up to make of it a “wall of refusal,” we tend to hide it from ourselves and each other. Why? The reasons, I think, are both social and psychological- and underlying both is a dysfunctional idea of what we are as persons.
Symptoms and Suppressions
In India at a leprosarium I met a young woman, a mother of four. Her case was advanced, the doctors pointed out, because for so long she had hidden its signs. Fearing ostracism and banishment, she had covered her sores with her sari, pulled the shoulder drape around so no one would see. In a similar fashion did I later hide despair for our world, cloaking it like a shameful disease- and so, I have learned, do others.
In a culture committed to the American Dream, it is hard to own up to despair. Wolman’s interviewees reported experiencing social pressures against the expression of their apprehensions. This is still the land of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, where an unflagging optimism is taken as means and measure of success. As commercials for products and campaigns for politicians attest, the happy and admirable person smiles a lot. The feelings of depression, loneliness, and anxiety, to which the thinking animal has always been heir, carry here an added burden: one feels bad about feeling bad.
One can even feel guilty about it. As Daniel Boorstin noted, failure of home, in a country which was built and nurtured on utopian expectations and which “voraciously demands stronger and deeper faith in it,” can seem un-American, feel like betrayal.
Even among religious folk, whose constructs of belief include suffering and crucifixion, despair can appear as a lapse of faith. At a vigil before a demonstration at the Pentagon against nuclear weapons, Daniel Berrigan spoke of hope. The necessity of hope in a new Jerusalem to carry us through. Others chimed in, affirming their belief in this vision and their gratitude for it. After a pause, a young man, among those participating in the week’s civil disobedience actions, spoke up falteringly. He questioned whether hope was really prerequisite, because, and he admitted this with difficulty, he was not feeling it. Even among friends committed to the same goal, it was hard for him (and brave of him, I thought) to admit despair. It was clear he feared he would be misunderstood, taken as cowardly or cynical- a fear validated by the response of some present.
“There is nothing more feared and less faced,” writes Jesuit essayist, William Lynch, “than the possibility of despair.” This is one reason, he says, why the mentally ill are so thoroughly isolated from the well- or why, one may add, expressions of anguish for the future are considered a breach of etiquette. Yet, he says, “hopelessness is a more usual and more human feeling than we are wont to admit.”
Despair is resisted so tenaciously because it represents a loss of control, an admission of powerlessness. Our culture dodges it by demanding instant solutions when problems are raised. My political science colleagues in France ridiculed this, I recall, as an endemic trait of the American personality. “You people prescribe before you find the diagnosis,” they would say. “Let the difficulties reveal themselves first before rushing in with a ready-made solution or else you will not understand them.” To do this would require that one view a stressful situation without the psychic security of knowing if and how it can be solved- in other words, a willingness to suffer a little.
"Don't come to me with aproblem unless you have a solution." That tacit injunction, operative even in public policy-making, further inhibits people from expressing feeling of despair. It rings like my mother's words to me as a child, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."
Our culture then discourages the acknowledgement of despair for the future. In the experience of Dr. Wolman’s interviewees, this inhibition amounts to a social taboo. In explaining their silence and numbness over nuclear weapons, they pointed out that those who break this taboo are considered “crazy,” or at least “depressed and depressing.” Many of my colleagues and I in the anti-nuclear movement have experienced similar inhibitions in expressing our preoccupation with long-term, lethal radioactive poisoning of the planet. No one wants a Cassandra around or welcomes a Banquo at the feast. Nor indeed are such roles enjoyable to play. When the prospect of collective suicide first hit me- and I know well the day and hour my defenses against this despair suddenly collapsed- I felt there was no one to whom in my grief I could turn. If there were- and indeed there were, for I have loving intelligent friends and family- what is there to say? Do I want them to feel this horror too? What can be said without casting a pall, or without seeming to ask for unacceptable words of comfort and cheer? So, as I have since found others have done, I shook and wept in solitude and continued in public to be, fairly recognizably, the same up-beat person as before.
To feel despair in such a cultural setting brings on a sense of isolation. The psychic dissonance can be so acute as to seem to border on madness. The distance between one’s inklings of apocalypse and the tenor of business-as-usual is so great that, though a person may respect his own cognitive reading of the signs, his affective response is frequently that is its he, not the society, that is insane.
Psychotherapy, as it is predominantly practiced, has offered little help for coping with these feelings, and indeed has often compounded the problem. Most practitioners have trouble crediting the notion that concerns for the general welfare might be genuine, and acute enough to cause distress. Assuming that all our drives are ego-centered, they tend to treat expressions of this distress reductionistically, as manifestations of private neurosis. To illustrate from my own case, which is far from unique: deep dismay over the destruction of the wilderness was seen as fear of my own libido (which the bulldozers were taken to symbolize); painful preoccupation with U.S. bombings of Vietnam was interpreted as an unwholesome hangover of Puritan guilt. Such “therapy,” of course, only intensifies the sense of isolation and craziness despair can bring, while inhibiting its recognition and expression.
In this regard many members of the psychiatric profession resemble Job’s comforters. Just as those pious, well-meaning friends could only assume that Job’s sufferings were caused by his sin, so most therapists would reduce despair to private pathology. In both cases the distress in question is cut and trimmed to fit the contours of meaning that society delimits for suffering.
At a recent conference of the Association for Humanistic Psychology I met Maxine, a veteran of the human potential movement. On the day after a talk in which I mentioned in passing the idea of despair-work, she shared with me her sense of relief at hearing these comments. She said she had been wondering why she did not feel better, since she had been freed-up, stimulated, relaxed, self-realized and self-actualized from just about every type of growth therapy going. With a kind of sober relief she could recognize now the social roots of her feelings of anxiety, accepting and validating the fact that she felt “at a loss” about her world and her children’s future in it. Although this recognition produced no solutions to global problems, she said she felt quieter, more centered and more conscious.
“I know a therapist,” writes William Lynch, “who abandoned the treatment of a particular schizophrenic in despair, only to find that his acknowledgement of despair had cured the patient! In acknowledging some of his own hopelessness he had…helped to relieve the patient of an impossible burden, the burden of having nothing but beautiful feelings.”
Joan, a Jungian analyst, tells of the increasing incidence in her patients of dreams of apocalypse. Likening them to C. G. Jung’s dream on the eve of the first World War, when he beheld Europe bathed in blood, she says these current ones are filled with symbols of mass death and planetary destruction. Such dreams, though painful, can get us in touch with the nature of present despair. Of a different order are the fantasies of apocalypse offered in mass entertainment today.
Now at least we can hear voices from within the psychiatric profession itself, which relieve us of that “impossible burden.” Dr. Rollo May, in a 1980 symposium on “The Recovery of Wholeness,” said, “The psychoanalytic response ought to be…our own absorption of the degree of despair that is present. The problem is our denial of the situation… but our chance for survival is nil unless we can face the despair without denial.” Dr. John Mack, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, became a member of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on the nuclear danger. From his own personal experience of “intense resistance to experiencing the nuclear danger as it really is,” he concludes that, “we must seek to embrace the terror and experience its validity, for the immediacy of nuclear death is real…Only when we can honestly contemplate this horror can we begin to do something about it. Until we do, it ‘has’ us…”
The biggest money-makers in the film industry today, as Andrée Conrad points out in Disaster and the American Imagination,” are movies that feature cataclysmic events and violent mass death. Earthquakes, rampaging sharks and killer bees, erupting volcanos and towering infernos doomed craft in air and sea, loaded with panicked passengers, vie in imageries of terror. Contrived with technical brilliance, these films draw large crowds and large profits. Their appeal, indeed their fascination, stems from an inchoate but pervasive sense of doom in the American public. The scenarios they present give structure and outlet to unformulated fears of apocalypse, and in so doing provide catharsis. But it is a dangerous catharsis, Ms. Conrad observes.
Hooking our anxieties onto isolated and unlikely emergencies, frequently handled with technological heroics, these entertainments give their audience, sitting safely ensconced in a comfortable theater, the illusion of having dealt with what is bothering them. On fictitious, improbably themes they air and exercise our dread, while inuring us to the prospects of mass death and raising our horror threshold another notch. They blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality, making the next day’s news seem like more of the same- alarms to be passively watched till the credits appear and we can stop for a beer on our way home to bed.
These entertainments constitute a new version of what Geoffrey Gorer in the ‘50s called our “pornography of death.” Just as the repression of sex in our puritanically-conditioned culture produces debased expressions of it, so is our repression of the reality of personal death released in fascination with sadistic violence. By analogous reasoning, disaster films can be seen as pornographies of despair. In the same way X-rated “adult” flicks cheapen the sexual hungers they trade on, the towering infernos and devouring jaws dull and misdirect our need to do genuine despair-work.
This work is needed because our culture makes it hard to get in touch with the genuine dimensions of our despair, and because until we do, our power of creative response to planetary crisis will be crippled. Until we can grieve for our planet and its future inhabitants, we cannot fully feel or enact our love for them. Such grief is frequently suppressed, not only because it is socially awkward. It is also denied because it is both hard to credit and very painful. At the root of both these inhibitions lies a dysfunctional notion of the self. It is the notion of the self as an isolated and fragile entity. Such a self has no reason to weep for the unseen and the unborn, and such a self, if it did, might shatter with pain and futility.
So long as we see ourselves a[s] essentially separate, competitive and ego-identified beings, it is difficult to respect the validity of our social despair, deriving as it does from interconnectedness. Both our capacity to grieve for others and our power to cope with this grief spring from the great matrix of relationships in which we have our being. Just as our pain is more than private, so is our resilience. We are, as open systems, sustained by flows of energy and information that extend beyond the reach of conscious ego. This can become evident to us as we confront despair and work through it.
[ part two , part three, part four, references and citations,
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