“That echo chorus lied to me.”
A significant portion of my consciousness is occupied by an awareness of suffering. But not only the immediately conceivable injustice of politics or oppression, but of personal suffering — existential suffering. This personal suffering is rarely if ever given political expression or cultural legitimacy; it is a suffering regulated to the corridors of silence, where it stifles without an audience, and equally without a solution.
Where better to clarify what I am talking about than Oprah? In her book, The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby pinpoints what has always made me anxious about Oprah. Central to her show is a narrative – one narrative – about the meaning of human trial and suffering. Suffering which arises out of misfortune is an opportunity in disguise to learn some new profound, spiritual lesson; and if you only have faith in this design of providence — often explicitly referred to as God’s providence — one will find the path to internal peace and, if your misfortune was due to some personal defects, redemption. There is, in other words, no meaningless sufferings. Every guest on Oprah’s show follows this script — and it is a script — of salvation through pious suffering. To my knowledge, she has had no one on the show to counter this narrative with the denial of providence, or an ultimate moral reason behind suffering.
Now, I am all for making lemonades out of lemons. But the pervasiveness of this doctrine, epitomized not only by Oprah but pretty much any media outlet that comments on existential questions, results in the condemnation of those who fail to find such edifying meaning in their suffering. There is something fundamentally wrong with people, in other words, who are depressed despite the best medication and therapy available, who persist in denying God or any objective meaning to human experience. They are the ungrateful, the weak, the failed and the arrogant.
What is responsible for the fact that what is in fact very historically rich experience is virtually ignored in American culture? I could probably research and write a whole book on it, so I hardly have an answer to offer immediately — but I would suspect it has a bit to do with stoicism, and a bit more to do with stoicism mixed with Christianity, and then a whole lot to do with the general belief in God that such Christianity has engendered, whether or not this providence is understood in strictly Christian terms. Throw in a bit of capitalist contempt for those deemed unproductive and unappreciative members of society, and you have a rich recipe for collective denial of persistent, unaccountable suffering — a denial of our own powerlessness over the human condition – and this denial makes life for those who dwell in it all the more isolated and unbearable.
Put simply, our culture usually denies that sometimes life just sucks, hard, painfully and long, and without any good reason. For sure you can learn things to your benefit from this suffering, and much art of great worth has been produced out of it, but this by no means is a reason for arguing that ultimately all the sad should reach some level of happiness, or that all sadness ultimately finds purpose and was intended for it. For those who believe they do not measure up to the level of control and happiness our Oprah-consuming world posits is waiting for all those sincerely seeking, there is nothing but a endless well of self-loathing waiting for them; there are hardly any voices to tell them that such is the human condition, and those who experience and realize its harsh realities cannot, through sheer mental exertion, do anything to change it.
I do not argue this in the cause of nihilism, or to bring despair to the world. Quite the opposite. For it seems to me that in light of this, all we can do is love and support each other, to help each other through. For some people, life is mostly the struggle, a sometimes continuous one that lacks storybook moments of triumphs. That does not mean it cannot have personal meaning or joyousness for them; but rather our society says to them persistently: “You ought to be happy as I am happy. Something is wrong with you if you are not.”
I believe that this attitude in fact brings much more suffering, much more loneliness upon the world than would otherwise be so if our culture as a whole lived with a consciousness and acceptance of the reality of existential suffering. But to stigmatize the unrepentant or unreformed individual who persists, and remains in an existential crises is merely the culture’s way of avoiding such a general shock to itself. In America, at least, the possibility that there is no ultimate, objective meaning haunts our deepest nightmares; it casts in doubt all we work for, strive for, believe is right and moral. It does not necessarily have to – but it does force us to bring our own souls to bare when formulating meaning, and it does mean we cannot demand of others the same experience, mission, or experience. And for those who have not been there, and fear both the darkness and know not the beauty of the endless internal universe, this is an idea worth all their anxious energy to deny.
Compared to some I’ve been around, but I really tried so hard
That echo chorus lied to me with its hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
–Neko Case.
