Adam Kirsch

Mar201301

The conservation of anxiety. It’s not by chance that the end of the Cold War coincided with the beginning of the global warming panic: when the prospect of annihilation by nuclear weapons receded, the quantum of anxiety humanity had developed in response was conserved by attaching itself to the prospect of annihilation by climate change. This was necessary because the fear humanity had developed since 1945—a qualitatively new fear in history—had been tolerable only because of the very imminence of nuclear war. We fear death and pain in advance, but the dying, or people who undergo massive trauma (e.g. car accident victims), are said to dissociate themselves from their bodies, to feel no pain or fear, as a defensive or anesthetic mechanism. In this way, humanity was able to live with the idea of its annihilation only by experiencing this annihilation as nearly present, by living in its impending shadow, and so inducing the hectic carelessness we feel in the face of extreme, inevitable catastrophe. When this shadow withdrew, the object itself—the idea of annihilation—became visible once again in itself, and it revealed its incomprehensible, intolerable massiveness. Put another way: it is possible to live in a world that is one minute from midnight, but not in a world that is an hour from midnight, because in that hour we feel that we have the power, and therefore the responsibility, to do something to avert the catastrophe. Global warming was the next-best apocalypse, allowing us to reinstate the imminence of the end. The belief that we have destroyed our biosphere allows us to be once again transfixed by the vision of our end, and once we are fixed we no longer have to deal with the pain of moving towards or away from the end.

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Only the fear that nuclear war was imminent made us careful enough to avoid it. Anyone born before 1989 was raised with the nightmarish dread of nuclear war, enforced through so much pop culture, and so felt the absolute responsibility to make sure that this nightmare never came to life. But those born after the Cold War never had to suffer this dread. That is why they are exactly the ones who will find it thinkable to engage in a nuclear war--and whatever is thinkable will eventually become actual. By this reckoning, the war should come when the post-Cold War generation is old enough to take charge of the world’s governments and militaries—say, around 2039.

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In a footnote in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes that fire was domesticated for the first time when a man resisted the impulse to put out a flame by urinating on it—an impulse that he says is covertly homosexual, since the flame is a phallus. Even if nothing of Freud’s work survived but this footnote, future historians would be able to deduce the whole truth about 20th-century Europe from the trust it placed in the author of such an idea--just as we can deduce the fate of the Roman Empire from the rise of Mithraism, with its bizarre doctrines and cruel rites.

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Americans bear last names from so many different languages, we forget the idea that a name was originally a description, a snapshot of a family at a moment in time. How far back would you have to go to find the original fat Gross, the teetotalling Bevilacqua? But if the adoption of a family name had been postponed to the next generation, the name would have been different--like Adam and the animals in Eden; if he had waited another minute, the tiger would have been called something else entirely.

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The half-lives of myths. If myths are stories that serve as a culture’s common reference points, then our problem is not that we lack myths, but that our myths don’t last long enough, that they succeed each other too rapidly. For two thousand years, every European knew what the story of Helen, Agamemnon, and Paris meant. Today, everyone born between 1930 and 1960 finds a similar meaning in the story of Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor, while those born after 1980 have never heard those names, but find just the same meaning in the story of Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. On the other hand, the more rapidly a myth decays, the more solidarity it produces in the narrow cohort of those who recognize it; duration is exchanged for depth. Thus Americans born in a given span of years can experience an emotional bond based on the television shows that happened to be on during their childhood. Each age cohort is as united, in this sense, as the citizens of each Greek polis used to be by its peculiar gods.

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It is almost impossible to overcome the feeling that the lives of those in the distant past are restful, unserious—that it was a mistake for those who lived them to suffer at all. After all, weren’t they like children or actors, simply preparing and rehearsing for our present, which is the only time things can really be at stake? Enlightenment would be the ability to view our own lives in this way, as only accidentally present, on the way to becoming the history of some other fretful “now.”

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Life in the Greek polis must have been like spending your whole adult life in the company of people you met in high school or college, prolonging that early competition into the adult world of politics. Only the esteem or contempt of those you start competing with early on can be wholly, instinctively gratifying or mortifying, because only a child takes competition seriously. Adults compete shamefacedly, since they are old enough to know that even real stakes—money, power, fame--are only pretend.

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Alexander and Caesar. The two heroes stand for the two types of ambition, romantic and classical. Romantic ambition bursts the world open, redefining the terms of struggle and multiplying the available objects of longing. Its strength is that it wins the loyalty of other men, who recognize that they can accomplish more through the hero than they would be able to on their own; without Alexander, no Ptolemy or Seleucus. Its weakness is that it is insatiable, and requires a hinterland of potential achievement that can never be exhausted this side of the grave: Alexander needs an Asia, and is destined to die there. Classical ambition, on the contrary, engrosses all the available rewards in a given system of honors: Caesar insists on holding the consulship year after year. Its strength is that it is achievable in this world, since it is the rules of the game that make it possible for the victor to know when he is victorious; defeating his rivals is more important to him than the conquest of new domains. Because this is a zero-sum game, however, the classical hero’s rivals are forced to resent him and ultimately to destroy him if they are to flourish: Caesar must die on the Senate steps.

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There is a particular uncanniness about anything that happens once a year. This is disguised in holidays, where entertainment and distraction and ritual cover over the strangeness. It’s best observed in yearly chores like going to the doctor or the accountant; such moments show the double unsuitedness of time to the self. First, because nothing changes: the same people, the same place, persist from year to year, as though all one's own inner experience in the interim has been an illusion; time reveals itself as stationary. Second, the realization that this stationariness is itself an illusion, since each year brings you closer to the end. In other words, time can neither be said to move nor to stand still; which shows that in some basic way we are not adapted to time, or do not belong to it.

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The pre-Socratics said that everything is water; today scientists say everything is 13-dimensional strings. The history of science is the only part of human history that fulfills the Hegelian dialectic: over 2,500 years we do not come to know more, but we learn the meaning of what we already knew—namely, that we do not know what is or why it is, and can only speak about it metaphorically. Progress consists of the refinement of this metaphor.

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The plan for nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, includes an attempt to communicate to human beings in the distant future that this is dangerous ground. This must be done not verbally but through landscape engineering, with signs so basic that even in the absence of language they would be recognized—crevasses, stark mountains, threatening rock formations. The dreadful fascination of this idea comes from the way it encapsulates four truths, in increasing order of terror: 1) That our injuries to the earth will long outlast our civilization: we can poison better than we can cure. 2) That we take official cognizance of the fact that our civilization will end, that a time will come when nothing of our current world will be at all communicable to the future--a realization no previous civilization has dared to make. 3) That this negates the premise of culture, particularly literature, which assumes the continuity of mankind over time--as in Horace's boast "non omnis mortar." 4) The possibility that the earth we inhabit is already marked in this way by signs that we can’t read, which means that they have failed in their intent, as ours must. After all, haven't we forgotten where the four angels with swords of fire stand guard?

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Opponents of cloning and genetic engineering take their stand on the idea of human nature—that a life in which we are made, instead of being born, will in some way be inhuman. The problem is not that this is false—it is true—but that the future won’t care, exactly in the same way that we don’t care that our lives would be considered inhuman by our ancestors of 5,000 or even 500 years ago. Just look at the way we are always clean, feel so little pain, do so little real work, and never see the stars: our progress is their inhumanity, our betrayal of their ways, much as a child’s growing up is a betrayal of his parents. To oppose cloning is thus to want to clone ourselves, morally and intellectually, into the future, to make the future resemble us exactly; while to endorse cloning is to recognize the inevitable, unbridgeable difference between us and the future, as between us and the past. 

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The common daydream of going back in time to kill Hitler or Stalin rests on the premise that the twentieth century as it actually occurred was the worst case scenario, so that any alternative would be better. But imagine a history in which Germany and Russia went to war just ten years later: they would both have had atomic weapons and surely would have used them, so the death toll would have been exponentially higher even than in World War II. It is possible to imagine that an angel trying to avert catastrophe from mankind would choose for the war and the Holocaust to take place, because all other outcomes would have been even worse. Such an angel would have to act knowing that he would never be thanked, only recriminated--because to thank him would be to acknowledge that the evil we committed was not the worst we could do, but the best.

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Even the best human civilizations have done nothing more than reduce fear and want to anxiety and dissatisfaction. The utopian, revolutionary impulse declares itself as the desire to improve on this achievement, to go onward to happiness and plenitude. But its actual achievement betrays its real desire, which is to smash the partial victory of civilization and return the world to its barbaric starting-point. Only then does the partial victory which is all we can achieve once more become difficult and distant enough to seem worth striving for.

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The law of the conservation of human potential. Every kind of emotion or experience we have today was known to earlier men, but expressed in different forms because of different social conditions. The need for such a postulate only arises now when social change is so rapid that we can’t see ourselves in our ancestors or credit any common nature between us—so we have to assume there is a continuity and try to find it underlying change. For instance: what is the past’s correlate of the current phenomenon of celebrity? Perhaps the local lord and lady, who were the focus of gossip and aspiration for their dependents and gave them imaginative access to the glamour we now approach through movie stars, pop stars, sports stars. The difference is that the lord and lady were celebrities on a small scale, a village or estate—as in Jane Austen. Today the celebrity is the focus of billions of people and must live at an exponentially greater rate of glamour and exposure, which is why they are almost always consumed. Celebrity is to past renown as today’s diet of abundance is to the past’s scarcity—we get obese and kill ourselves with megadoses of fat, sugar and salt, which were unavailable before, just as the celebrity overdoses on attention. But the basic human appetite and dynamic is the same—the desire to live vicariously through an anointed other. 

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In bad times, people feel that whether they act or refrain from acting they are guilty. In good times, people are still actually guilty either way, but they feel they can ignore this with a good conscience.

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The current fear over the loss of biodiversity is rooted in the sense that we are recklessly destroying what it took evolution so long to create. But life as it heretofore evolved was a survival of the fittest under conditions of nature. What will survive from now on is what is fittest for human use and pleasure; our will has become the environment in which evolution takes place. In other words, human nature has superseded nature, and what we are really afraid of is the matriculation this represents—the responsibility of becoming nature, which means obliterating nature as something given to us. Yet this transformation was always coming, from the first time a human being made a fire or notched a stick. Nothing short of our destruction could have stopped us from becoming the new nature, since it is our nature to replace nature.

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The strange lack of humanity’s interest in going back to the Moon—such a huge, momentous achievement, which we simply abandoned and never even regret. The reason must be that new places are valuable only because they have not been smeared with the mucus snail-trail of our presence; now that we’ve been to the moon, which expanded our notion of what parts of creation are possible for us to visit, all those parts of creation are desecrated and disqualified in advance, because we are repelled by the potential of our own presence. Thus our interest shifts to dark matter and dark energy—purely hypothetical substances which, by definition, we can never perceive or affect. Only where we are not is worthy of our admiration.

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Certainly in the future there will be many fewer people on Earth, and they will be happier than we are, partly because of that—because they will lack the sense of superfluousness that comes with great numbers. The only thing we can record to communicate to those people, the thing that is distinctively ours, is that sense of superfluousness—we must even take pride in it, because it is the special quality the past and the future cannot know. But that is exactly why it is impossible to communicate: the future will not want to know it, they will be bored by our boredom and contemptuous of our fear; and rightly so.

ADAM KIRSCH is the author of two books of poems, The Thousand Wells and Invasions. His most recent book is Why Trilling Matters.