Distraction
One of the questions posed by modern times is what happens when what is secondary in human affairs becomes primary? What happens when the flies that buzz around someone’s head become more important than the head? If this seems like a tale along the lines of the boy who went to sell a cow and became distracted by the blandishments at the fair, it is. The same mix of allegory, parable, and fairy tale is at work. To the question, “What is the point of this activity?” modern times has had no real answer. The energy of the doing was the answer. There was no cow to sell but there was much to partake of at the fair.
Answers about human activity have been simple—for God and King being two main ones. When the world of the kings and the God they served died after WWI and the Middle Ages finally ended, humanity found itself up in the air, perilously tethered to ideologies that either announced themselves with violent grandiloquence such as communism and fascism or did not overtly announce themselves but were very much present in the workings of capitalism. An ocean of blood was shed on behalf of those tethers, which were terribly real but also, as they were imaginative constructs masquerading as immutable reality, unreal. The thousand-year Reich lasted twelve years; the massive edifice of Soviet communism crumbled and fell. The supposed activity of modern times was progress, a term that did not agree with the vast suffering that took place in the decades at the heart of the twentieth century. You didn’t have to be facing a torturer or executioner or, in the benign West, standing in a bread line or looking at a headline that screamed bigotry, to wonder about this progress.
You might walk out of a theater after having seen a newsreel about Auschwitz followed by a Bing Crosby movie. It wasn’t that they balanced one another because they didn’t. You might start whistling because Bing Crosby did that, he made you want to whistle, but darkness pervaded you, the feeling that whatever bad words you had for some people weren’t enough, that even death was not enough. Those were hard feelings. You’d rather whistle and who could blame you? You felt a bit guilty but then you gave that up because guilt did no good, particularly since you had nothing to do with that hell in the newsreel. So as you walked home or boarded the street car or got into the used Packard you bought with the wages you made at the aircraft factory, you whistled. The night received the sounds and said nothing back. That, you thought, was part of the beauty of the night—a good darkness.
Amiable Bing was an amiable distraction. The inclination to keep on dancing and smiling is as sane as any human response, particularly when the reality represented by the horrors of modern times augured something deeper than everyday difficulties, something so terrifically organized as to create a new category of evil. That category pertained to a level of suffering—both the inflicting of suffering and the bearing of suffering—that demanded a response on a spiritual level equivalent to the slow but galvanic change that occurred in the century or two after Christ’s death. That response, by and large, did not happen, history being as much about what does not happen as what does happen.
The wrestling with the suffering manifested in the millions of names of murdered men, women, and children did occur in private in many a soul. Some people committed suicide over that wrestling. Some people felt, understandably, that there no longer was anything of worth to believe in, beginning with God and ending with the human race. The large-scale recognition—the museums, writings, and memorials—that occurred over the decades following the Holocaust was a genuine response, but was not a response that signaled a new page in the text of human spirit. That page came to life most vividly in the writings of Simone Weil who accommodated the pagan and Catholic worlds and who—“violent in her judgments and uncompromising,” as Czeslaw Milosz noted—did not live to see those newsreels. Her religion has yet to happen.
What did happen was that the distraction factor—as represented by ballgames, movies, and machine experiences, to name three—burgeoned fantastically. In face of the terrible consequences of ideology came the seeming lack of consequence of an ever-growing technology. The mundane activities—making money, buying things, being with other people, communicating—became the domain of speed, ease, and superficial thoroughness. Thanks to computers, a lot of activity could be sifted through in a very short time. Thanks to mobile phones people could babble at moments when they previously could not babble. Control over daily actions, both one’s own and others’, progressed until the using of the electronic technology became as basic as eating and sleeping.
To look at what used to be called the pageant of human progress is to see a sort of comic postscript appended to the latter days of modern times. Deliverance lay in machines that had become personal. History in the sense of the broad and deep river that bore humanity along, the troubled current of long abiding beliefs, prejudices, passions, and creeds seemed to dry up. Only the present moment of the hand doing something with the machine existed. The machine was an end in itself, as if the machine created a world and the human being existed to accept that world. To see children walking around with tiny computers is to wonder what the point is of being human. Perhaps there is none.
“Things are in the saddle. And ride mankind,” wrote Emerson. As inventive animals, we make use of whatever we invent. Should we be inclined to wring our hands over the advent of thinner and thinner realities, we may recall that most of the stirring adjurations in every age that have pricked humanity to go forth have ended in a pile of corpses. Then again, triviality is its own empty reward.