civil conversation

I was impressed by the colloquy between David Brooks and E.J Dionne yesterday on NPR. Usually their job is to squabble, albeit in a slightly tonier way than is typical of most other paired media pundits. Brooks in particular strove this time to hit a higher mark of reflection, in the moment of opportunity for a New Civility in our public discourse he thinks the Tucson aftermath affords:

…the most important thing [is] acknowledging your own weakness. I need E.J. because I don’t have 100 percent of the truth. I may have 60 percent, he may have 40, but, you know… we need each other to balance each other out and we need the conversation. Without that conversation, we really have nothing. And so that’s why we need civility because individually each of us are weak.

Dionne then cited the theologian/philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, from (improbably enough) Wright City, Missouri, just down the road from my own boyhood home. “We must see the error in our own truth and the truth in our opponent’s error.”

Brooks had earlier quoted Niebuhr in his Times column:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. … Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

It’s a fine sentiment, if overstated. (Surely there are many worthwhile things each of us can hope to achieve in our brief time on Earth.) It reminds me of John Dewey’s statement about the continuous human community.

[Interesting, btw, to see Brooks invoking a theologian/philosopher. In the current New Yorker (“Social Animal,” Jan. 17) he writes: “Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.” But maybe his point is that the present generation is lacking in wise theologian/philosophers?]

The very next line from Niebuhr, not quoted by the pundits, deserves equal time. It’s from The Irony of American History, which one of my Intellectual History profs had us Mizzou undergrads read back in the ’70s.

The irony of America’s quest for happiness lies in the fact that she succeeded more obviously than any other nation in making life “comfortable,” only finally to run into larger incongruities of human destiny by the same achievements by which it escaped the smaller ones.

We have a higher destiny on Earth. Niebuhr and Dewey disagreed about whether we have one higher still, but never mind. The point to ponder here is that we’ve got to be kinder and more receptive to one another. We’ve got to have a civil conversation about how to do it.

Raw energy, “pure delight”

Rebecca Solnit’s new book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster “investigates the fleeting, purposeful joy that fills human beings in the face of disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and even terrorist attacks…” My favorite example, which she discusses: William James’s reaction to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, his first-hand account of which exudes a strange joy and gratitude for the mere opportunity to be present to witness such unanticipated destruction and its amelioration. It is, I once wrote,

James’s personal account of the great San

Francisco earthquake, an account that must be at least curious

and possibly illuminating to anyone who has ever been visited

with an earthquake experience of his own. My own small quake

experience was in Palm Springs, California, on May 7, 1995, a

relatively insignificant shimmy on the Richter scale (5.0) but

enough to awaken me from a deep sleep at 4 a.m. with an

immediate, inexplicable awareness of exactly what was happening.

I confess that the dominant feeling for me, then, was fear.

James’s firsthand account of the events of April 18, 1906

is, by contrast, not one born of fear at all:

@EXT: [L]ying awake at about half past five . . .I felt the bed

begin to waggle. . . . Sitting up involuntarily and taking a

kneeling position, I was thrown down on my face. The room was

shaken like a rat by a terrier . . . [My] emotion consisted

wholly of glee . . . at the vividness which such an abstract idea

or verbal term as “earthquake” could put on when translated into

sensible reality and verified concretely. . . . I felt no trace

whatever of fear; it was pure delight . . .

@TEXT:James described his total quake experience as “mind-

enlarging,” reporting in the quake’s aftermath a sense of

cheerful solidarity among the survivors, “a kind of uplift in the

sense of a ‘common lot’ that took away the sense of loneliness

that (I imagine) gives the sharpest edge to the more usual kind

of misfortune. . . .”88

It is no coincidence, I think, that one of the first things

James wrote after the quake was an essay called The Energies of

Men. Like Emerson and Thoreau before him, he was alert to the

very human significance of natural events. An earthquake, even a

puny one, is a release of vast amounts of energy. We are

conservators and expenders of energy, too, but much of our effort

is dissipated. “The human individual lives usually far within his

limits . . . [H]e energizes below his maximum, and he behaves

below his optimum,”89 habitually. But here is our greatest seed

of hope: our bad habits were made to be broken. Like Emerson,

James is a champion of self-reliance and the spirit of reform.

Perhaps more than Emerson, he is also a champion of hope as the

collective human urge so admirably displayed by those San

Franciscans whose “hearty frame of mind” and eagerness to make a

fresh beginning amidst natural devastation he found so

uplifting.

an account that must be at least curious and possibly illuminating to anyone who has ever been visited with an earthquake experience of his own. My own small quake experience was in Palm Springs, California, on May 7, 1995, a relatively insignificant shimmy on the Richter scale (5.0) but enough to awaken me from a deep sleep at 4 a.m. with an immediate, inexplicable awareness of exactly what was happening. I confess that the dominant feeling for me, then, was fear.

James’s firsthand account of the events of April 18, 1906 is, by contrast, not one born of fear at all:

Lying awake at about half past five… I felt the bed begin to waggle… Sitting up involuntarily and taking a kneeling position, I was thrown down on my face. The room was shaken like a rat by a terrier… [My] emotion consisted wholly of glee… at the vividness which such an abstract idea or verbal term as “earthquake” could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified concretely. . . . I felt no trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight . . .

James described his total quake experience as “mind-enlarging,” reporting in the quake’s aftermath a sense of cheerful solidarity among the survivors, “a kind of uplift in the sense of a ‘common lot’ that took away the sense of loneliness that (I imagine) gives the sharpest edge to the more usual kind of misfortune. . . .”

It is no coincidence, I think, that one of the first things James wrote after the quake was an essay called “The Energies of Men.” Like Emerson and Thoreau before him, he was alert to the very human significance of natural events. An earthquake, even a puny one, is a release of vast amounts of energy. We are conservators and expenders of energy, too, but much of our effort is dissipated. “The human individual lives usually far within his limits . . . [H]e energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum,” habitually. But here is our greatest seed of hope: our bad habits were made to be broken. Like Emerson, James is a champion of self-reliance and the spirit of reform.

Perhaps more than Emerson, he is also a champion of hope as the collective human urge so admirably displayed by those San Franciscans whose “hearty frame of mind” and eagerness to make a fresh beginning amidst natural devastation he found so uplifting.

more congenial

Thoreau’s congeniality reminded me of James’s. This one I recalled correctly.

A linchpin of his commitment to humanism, pluralism, and free will was the conviction that we have the capacity (“power”) to do what needs to be done. We are not without resources to meet the challenges of living. All great periods of progress and achievement attest to it:

“Each and all of them have said to the human being, ‘the inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess.'” (“Sentiment of Rationality“)

We can do it if we try, maybe. The world might just match and multiply our exertions, you never know. It’s worth an effort. Nothing ventured etc.

A useful conviction, whether we intend to do great things (like launching a rocket)  or small (like getting out of bed to face another dawn). Some of us sometimes need reminding.

But is it true? It better be. That’s the audacity of hope, whose opposite (for those of a certain temper) is despair. As a twenty-something, James would literally have killed himself if he couldn’t have justified (to himself) his right to believe this.

That’s the center of his pragmatic pluralism: believe what you must, then make appropriate revisions and course corrections when you see where that belief has taken you. It’s not epistemologically correct. But then, the world may not be safe for epistemology. Or congenial to it.

Depression

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a depressed person who wanted to get out of bed in the morning… Much as we would like to explain clinical depression [as] either genetics or environment, bad wiring or bad nurturing, it is usually a combination of the two that sets the illness off.” Daphne Merkin

Dr. McCoy used to complain about the barbaric state of medicine in the 23d century. If he’d been around in the mid-20th, to witness the “therapy” available to mentally-troubled patients then, he’d have been apoplectic. (“Dammit, Jim! I’m a doctor, not a sado-terrorist!”) Electro-convulsive shocks to the central nervous system kill memory and any latent zest for living the patient might have hoped to revive. Daphne Merkin’s account in yesterday’s Times Magazine is a chilling reminder of just how badly we need to haul ourselves into a less benighted, more civil and humane and hopeful future.

I’m an optimist. Hope for tomorrow is indispensable, as Merkin seems to have learned. There are “bound to be glimpses of light” if we take the long view.