Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

(I depart here from what I hope is a tone of moderation for a long moment of parenthetical candor. As a fiction writer, I feel smothered by this collective fiction, this Reality. I do not admire it or enjoy it, this work of grim and minor imagination which somehow or other got itself acknowledged as The Great Truth and The Voice of Our Time because of rather than despite its obvious thinness and fraudulence. So I will give it a bad review, in the spirit of cankered optimism which moves all indignant reviewers. Maybe I can hit it on the head, put an end to it. This is not a realistic hope. Maybe others will agree with me, and start a brilliant movement in a direction I cannot anticipate, and they will put an end to it. This is scarcely more realistic.

But these collective fictions matter. They have the profoundest influence on what we know and see and understand. When they make fear the key to interpretation of history and experience, as they do so often, as ours does now, nothing contains a greater potential for releasing all the varieties of destruction. Fearfulness assumes a hidden narrative — that we are ill despite our apparent health, vulnerable despite our apparent safety. We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind. Routinely discounting the preponderance of evidence is not the behavior of reasonable people, nor is devaluing present experience because it may be overtaken by something worse. I think we are not taking responsibility for keeping ourselves reasonable, individually or collectively — that we no longer admire or reward reasonableness because it has lost its place in our imagination. Now it is as if public discourse exists only to be disrupted, as if gaffes and scandals, without regard to their authenticity or significance, were the real substance of collective life, and attempts at coherent conversation about what is to be wished for or what is to be done were pretension or naiveté or a strategy of concealment, the bland surface through which the next brainless sensation is sure to erupt. When a good man or woman stumbles, we say, “I knew it all along,” and when a bad one has a gracious moment, we sneer at the hypocrisy. It is as if there is nothing to mourn or to admire, only a hidden narrative now and then apparent through the false, surface narrative. And the hidden narrative, because it is ugly and sinister, is therefore true.

Lately Americans have enjoyed pretending they are powerless, disenfranchised individually and deep in decline as a society, perhaps to grant themselves latitude responsible people do not have or desire. In fact, our ability to do harm, by act or omission, is great beyond all reckoning, and greater by the measure of our refusal to accept this fact and its implications. Powerless people can hardly demand coherency of themselves, since they must always react to forces they cannot trust, whose wiles they cannot anticipate. They are safe from responsibility, safe from blame.

Before I leave the pretended shelter of this aside I will say two things more. First, individuals have collective fiction as a reality to deal with. Anyone who has brought up children knows the overwhelming power of the larger culture, and how for the peace and sanity of the family it must be in some degree accommodated. Anyone who struggles to meet the expectations the society creates must cope with emotional injury and exhaustion, or at best, very unsatisfying rewards. We are all in effect dragooned into it, enforcing compliance on ourselves, because as individuals we have few real choices, even if we know we should want them. It is hard to be critical of a society without seeming uncompassionate toward its members, yet, mysteriously, societies themselves tend not to be compassionate toward their members, and must be criticized for that reason.

Second, the art of fiction, intentional and acknowledged fiction, the kind with the author’s name on it, lies outside this phenomenon of collective fiction for the most part, and often attempts by one means or another to grapple with it. But Reality, the collective fiction, has educated our audience, as surely as the pulpit educated Emerson’s. It has given the writer little to build on and little of interest to explore. (I dream this might change.)

Our collective fiction is full of anxiety, empty of humor and generosity. It elaborates itself in the manner of phobia or delusion rather than vision or fancy. We find comfort in anxiety because it engrosses our attention, which we have in surplus, and are usually at a loss to employ. And anxiety is a stimulant, like love, like hatred, though generally not so prone to extravagant expression as they are, indeed even secretive, and therefore liable suddenly to produce great effects from what are apparently very small causes.

Here is one topic under which the phenomenon of anxiety can be considered. As a culture we are terrified of illness, though as people go we are rather safe from it. Perhaps to feed our anxiety, illness for us has overspilled definition and is now to be discovered everywhere, in everyone. Emotions are regarded as symptoms and treated medically, including, of course, anxiety. This is true even while the boundless resources of the society seem largely bent to the work of stimulating fear, disgust, resentment — emotions that in fact are pathological and also pathogenic. It is as if we took morphine to help us sleep on a bed of nails. Another generation would have looked for another solution.

Our terror of doctors and of medications is a generalization of the same anxiety that drives us to them, another form of hypochondriasis. Obviously both doctors and medications have the potential to do great harm, first of all because they are creatures of this civilization. Doctors responded too frequently to patients’ demands for antibiotics, for example, and compromised the usefulness of antibiotics in the course of launching a spectacular advance in the evolution of bacteria. I think it is fair to assume that doctors are responding too frequently now to other demands, whose consequences will, in not too long a time, bring fresh and vivid new grounds for anxiety. We will not reflect, or draw the lessons of experience, because fearful people improvise solutions, and feel too powerless to consider a problem from the point of view of their own responsibility.

Here I should make a distinction between the fictional and the false. They are entirely different things. The givens of the collective fiction I have been describing are that societies decay; that youth ends and the body fails; that strangers sometimes mean us harm and friends sometimes connive in our ruin; that things are rarely as they appear to us; that out of any present circumstance there might arise misfortune in the face of which we would be utterly helpless. Not a word of this is false. Common sense will confirm it all.

Nor do we indulge in the falsehood that we can make ourselves secure, even while desperate effort is clearly assumed to be the appropriate response to our condition. We are busy as rodents. But this is for the most part not real purpose, merely anxiety expending itself. Beside their root in fact, I think these collective narratives may have something like an organic life, in the way they invade experience and transform it to the uses of their own survival. Anxiety-driven people are right to be anxious. They are prone to stress and burnout, to illness and early death. They have trouble creating satisfactory friendships and families. What if they have misappropriated their time just sufficiently to allow their children to become ominous strangers? What if they have made a too single-minded investment of their lives, and then the market for their skills plunges? These things happen — anyone who has ever glanced at a newspaper knows it. They are right to lie awake.