Cold Shower 15: Words and Wonder

Cold Shower Words and Wonder
Volume 1, Article XV

Dr. Fisher, I don’t know actually how to begin. I feel lost. I am a recent college graduate on my first job. You can cut the pessimism here with a knife. A negative work climate is definitely not what I need. I think I am cynical, but don’t want to be. Does that make sense? I read about the schoolteacher in New Jersey who is killed for her new Toyota by a guy just 17, four years younger than I am, and I feel sick. I read about the pedophile in Scotland who kills nearly a score of five and six-year-olds, and I feel ashamed of the human race. What is most surprising is that I hide my gloomy mood by pretending to be cheerful, and feel guilty for that. Not even my best friends know the “real me.” Is there any hope for me?

Welcome to young adulthood! Going from childhood to adulthood is a precarious and rocky terrain full of booby traps, hot coals, sink holes, quick sand, and yes, terror, and you are now just crossing into it.

One of the remarkable things about your confession is that you mention guilt, shame, and the sense of feeling a fraud, and all in the same paragraph. This is refreshing. A healthy sense of guilt and shame is not only good for the spirit, but it holds the human community together. Awareness of dissembling is the first step toward humility. We live in an atmosphere today in which there is little sense of shame. Television continues to push the boundaries of broadcast drama with blunt language; lewdness is “in” on talk radio; television shock personalities cultivate an increasing tolerance for grossness. It is as if letting go of our inhibitions makes the world right and glorious, when just the opposite proves to be the case. It suggests a character flaw that is so common that it is now taken to be a norm.

You are right to be concerned as the growing storm of changing mores attacks our person, developing a sense of self-hatred, self-contempt, and self-doubt, leaving us with a feeling of helpless and running on empty.

This attack on our humanness works because to some extent we are all frauds, all hiding our real appearance from public view, afraid if the world knew our true identity by learning of closeted secrets, we would be rejected, isolated, and alone, and yes, shamed.

Notice how these human jackals in the entertainment industry exploit our weakness to develop their power and prominence over us.

What do many of us do? We read their books, go to their plays, attend their movies, listen to their music, dial in on their radio talk shows, and watch them cavort on television, shielding the anger they evoke because we want appear to be “with it,” to not register our disgust. You are an exception, and should take pride in this because it is only through embracing our terror and disgust that we find our way.

Not only is there hope for you, but also I would encourage you to explore your gloom and not retreat from it. Those acts of social pathology you mention are truly abhorrent. What leads people to such behavior is beyond conjecture.

One thing seems certain. Guilt and shame were dulled to the point of being nonexistent twisting their character into caricatures of evil.

The young man, just turned seventeen, decided that he needed a new automobile of this specific model and make, and took it, along with the owner’s life. The pedophile was rejected as a scoutmaster, and the anger of that rejection apparently perverted a mind already severely damaged.

We are understandably appalled at these vile acts. They bruise our senses, and violate our honor, but they also alert us to the fact that evil is real, and that the human species is fragile. Anyone can lose social orientation if shame and guilt are obliterated.

Guilt evolves from the anxiety one feels from the sense that one has departed from accepted values and norms that govern society. It is not simply the result of individual inadequacy. It is more complicated than that, arising from conflicting values and demands in a climate of accelerating stress. Guilt can be a reflection of inconsistencies in the social and cultural climate in which one thing is preached and another is practiced; in which the individual sees where bad is rewarded and good is not recognized; in which heroes turn out to be villains in hero disguise.

The point is if you are looking for reasons to nullify guilt there are always ample inconsistencies at hand to justify ignoring it.

No two individuals experience the same environment even if they are twins. Guilt may be traumatic to one because it violates social norms, but be an opportunity for another to exploit normative weaknesses. It is a double-edged condition. The person traumatized by guilt may never pushed the boundaries of convention, whereas another may be of just such a temperament, and in the process cause the development of new values.

Guilt is a natural human condition but not a fixed value. That is why disobedience and rebellion of social mores represent typical behavior on the road from adolescence to adulthood. Identity can only be claimed when these values are internalized voluntarily and no longer a matter of coercive conformity because society insists it be so.

Think for a moment what produced guilt in your grandparents. It could have been living together “in sin” while not being married; getting an illegal abortion; receiving communion without being in a state of grace having had sex outside of marriage, and so on.

Today, a “trial marriage” is common where people live together without guilt or social sanction; abortion is legal; and mortal sin has lost its clout. Guilt today is felt for letting down a friend, not paying your bills and going bankrupt, being poor, being unemployed, being uneducated, and not being pretty or handsome.

Guilt is different because morality is in the mind of the times. It is fluid, not fixed. Failure to integrate conflicting values into a socially acceptable system is one of the causes of social pathology. To sociopaths, the enemy is society with the human face of the individuals meant to feel their wrath.

Shame is social. Guilt is personal. The shame phenomenon involves concealing something, which might damage a person’s social standing in the community – an abusive priest of altar boys; a spy who gives secrets to the enemy; a CEO who commits fraud; a parent who has incest with an offspring; a teacher who has sex with an underage student. There is a saying, Shame in a human marks the inner border of sinning; where he will blush there begins his noble self.

With shame, mind and flesh, essence and existence touch each other. All feelings of shame have this in common: the corporate body has let the spiritual body down. There is felt to be a bridge between the material and spiritual world, between the sacred and profane. When social life is treated profanely, shame is the consequence. These two worlds differ decidedly in adolescence and adulthood.

In the one, shame is practically nonexistent, in the other; a healthy sense of shame is an indicator of a maturing social conscience. On the other hand, the morbidity of an exaggerated sense of shame may indicate a relapse into self-pitying childhood.

Shame that is fixed, not fluid, in which a person decides every case in precisely the same terms and in the same way contributes to social dysfunction, and leads many who might otherwise be disposed to tolerance of their shortcomings to gravitate to anti-social behavior. It is fostered by the idea, “I’m a bad apple anyway so why not behave like one?”

We have seen this in children who reject religion as adults in any form only because religious zealots pounded it incessantly into their heads in their formative years without allowing fluidity to seek its own relevance.

Your quandary might be explained as an attempt to bridge the “Rites of Passage” with evocative language: that is, shame, guilt, fraud, and so on. If so, it is a religious awakening. This is a journey every thinking individual eventually enjoins to develop awareness.

“Words and wonder” can all be traced back to our natural inclination to religion. We like to say we are spiritual but not necessarily religious, failing to realize belief and faith in the human condition is a form of religion.

Religion depends on language to guide us to self-understanding. Atheists and agnostics have trouble with such expressions as “In God We Trust,” or in bible stumping preachers justifying their rhetoric with “the word of God,” or such commentaries as Genesis which commence with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God . . .”

They fail to see the wonder of the word has always opened us to life. Instead, they hear the pompous rhetoric. It is our nature to believe we are not alone on an isolated planet surrounded by a trillion uninhibited stars. Nor is it our nature to believe this is all there is. Our spirit keeps us questioning our doubt, while it keeps our temporal material being alive, and not the reverse order of things.

You are entering the “wonder of the word” in a world in which the sun is not always out, every day is not always idyllic, and what you always believed to be so may not necessarily prove upon closer examination to be the case.

You are sensing, gauging, integrating, discarding, and synthesizing life experience into a philosophy, which is where the “wonder of the word” resides.

You are becoming a fellow traveler with the shaman priest, the Indian mystic, the Mesopotamian prophet, the English poet, the Irish artist, the Italian scientist, the Greek philosopher, and the German psychologist before you. They used the same equipment that you possess, your mind, to wonder about the same things with “words of wonder.”

Doubt is the foundation of belief and faith, first in oneself, and then in others, and then finally in all things.

Poet Walt Whitman wrote and published his iconic book of poems, “Leaves of Grass” (1855) with his own money, producing 795 copies. Reputable publishing houses rejected the book because of its racy content and self-aggrandizing prose. He couldn’t sell it at $2 a copy, then reduced it to $1, and finally to 50 cents, and still it did not sell. When newspapers wouldn’t review his book, Whitman took the unusual step of reviewing it himself. He wrote he liked the book.

With boundless confidence, his poems directly addressed readers of future generations. He was prophetic as the book sells in the tens of thousands of copies each year, as it welcomes a new audience with a similar mindset and yearning. His most famous poem in the book, “Song to Myself,” resonates with readers to this day: I celebrate myself, and sing myself . . .

Your reference to your friends is revealing. It is a constant war in life to weigh the merits of intimacy and shared confidence and the need for the safety of personal isolation. Trust is at issue. To experience trust you must take risks. That means sharing the real you with select others. In order to have a true friend, however, you must first start by being a friend to yourself, trusting yourself, confiding in yourself, and not lying to yourself. Being open and honest with you to yourself is what Walt Whitman is celebrating. It is clear you have made a beginning with this note.

Copyright (1996) see Dr. Fisher’s The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend discounted to $12 shipping and handling included.