LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD -- Perennial Problem of Emptiness vs. Caring in an Age in Transition

My daughter, Jennifer, graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in Marketing & Public Relations last Saturday, December 15, 2007. There were 3,600 graduates. I was thinking about her when I first started this piece, and have not been to bed since Wednesday in an effort to finally finish it. The piece is dedicated to her who is very special and has worked very hard to reach this milestone. I salute her and her graduating classmates.
JRF

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LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD

Perennial Problem of Emptiness vs. Caring in an Age in Transition

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007

“From the lessons of history concerning life and death, the blossoming and sickness of society, man learns hardly anything. He behaves either as if past history were nonexistent or as if the past presented no situation essentially comparable to that in which his own society finds itself; as if there were no causal relationships and consequences; as if there were no such thing as socio-cultural sickness, and hence no need to sacrifice momentary pleasures and other sensate utilities and values in order to avoid an infinitely greater catastrophe. In this field of experience he remains virtually unteachable.”

Pitrim Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age (1941), p. 325.


“Once when ‘Care’ was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by. ‘Care’ asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While ‘Care’ and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: ‘Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called ‘homo’ (man), for it is made out of humus (earth).’”

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1962), p. 242.

* * * * * * * * * * *

I’ve embarked on this discussion of “emptiness” and “caring” by quoting the Russian born but American pioneering sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, and the German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger. Both men seem increasingly relevant. Sorokin wrote with passionate clarity about culture; Heidegger with murky detachment about being. Both saw the need for a complete change of contemporary thinking, as well as the need for a fundamental transformation of our conduct toward other men, and the world at large. Neither name has mainstream identity. Even so, their wisdom permeates our time.

UNTEACHABLE EMPTINESS OF OUR TIMES

Heidegger quotes this ancient parable of “Care,” which Goethe also uses at the end of Faust (1832). Goethe’s story is of a disillusioned scholar who deserts his “ivory tower” of academia to seek happiness in the real world. He makes a pact with Satan, spiraling down through a number of escapades to the brink of moral degradation. Like the parable, the moral certainty and intellectual satisfaction that Faust seeks the more insecurity and dissatisfaction he encounters.

Rollo May captures the sense of this in Love and Will (1969) when he suggests modern man lives in a “schizoid” society and culture. He cautions us, however, not to think of “schizoid man” in the psychopathological sense, but in terms of our increasingly self-detachment.

It follows we are out of touch. We avoid close relationships. We have an inability to feel. Yet, in our stubborn desire to remain the same, we become unteachably empty. Even so, we cannot escape caring. We carry caring to our death, as it is our connection with the Earth as conscious thinking man.

Pitrim Sorokin, on the other hand, in Crisis of Our Age (1941) reminds us we are in a transitional period.

The old myths and symbols of stability by which we once oriented ourselves are gone or have disintegrated beyond recognition: the nuclear family; the sacred vows of marriage; the sense of community; the concept of the common good; the ethical standard of the Ten Commandments; the central union of trust, honesty, fairness, and love to character; the natural joy of honest work; all manifestations of caring, all in trouble, all in hasty decline.

The same forces that have determined growth and achievement in our Sensate culture have made unavoidable the growth of the cancer of its disintegration. The more we have the less we feel ourselves to be. Bigger has not proven better, while the distinctions between true and false, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, positive and negative have been increasingly dissolved. Boundaries have lost their meaning. We have become “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land,” a stranger in the artificial world we have created.

To counter this, we have retreated into our inventions and innovations reversing our minds to “small is better.” This is personified in mobiles: digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players, iPods, iPhones, and various other electronic wonders. We think we are changing when we are merely flip-flopping. Technology is the new narcotic of the mind. It forgets and forgives our angst and excesses. Today the greatest terror is to be alone without a cell phone.

Anxiety is rampant. We cling to each other electronically, not out of love and caring, but out of boring dullness. We try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love when we are afraid to feel, afraid to love, afraid to step aside from the masses to be different. We are afraid to make choices; afraid to choose one person over another; one career over another; one thing over another. We are afraid to take risks, afraid to take chances. We embrace the Grim Reaper of fate, masking our anguish by putting the tattoo needle to our bodies to become walking billboards of anomie.

Our self-identity is skin deep. We are obsessed with knowing who we are separate from everyone else, only to become restless imitation of everybody. Peter Berger in The Homeless Mind (1973) sees us liberated from the narrow controls of family and community, but lost and empty, unable to influence our situation or others. We balance precariously on the precipice of apathy.

Apathy, Love and Violence

If this dismal outline of our society and culture is disheartening, consider the first step that always follows apathy. It is violence to others or to ourselves.

We are at war with ourselves on every street, every corner, in every community, in every church, school and home.

We have more guns than citizens with nearly everyone over the age of ten with at least one cell phone. We cannot stand silence, or being alone. We go to the mall as much for the noise, and for the crowd and anonymity as much as to shop.

We look for holy causes in which we can lose our identity, our apathy, and ourselves in something bigger than we are, where someone else takes charge, does the thinking, makes the choices, and takes responsibility for the action.

We do this out of a lack of individual self-worth and the gnawing sense of powerlessness.

We are perfect fodder for fanatics and fanaticism, for holy causes and half-truths. Our glass is always half empty if not bone dry. We are at the ready to blame others for the fix we’re in. Enter ambulance chasers who rescue us from ourselves and then turn us into their ornaments.

Look around you. We are moving faster than ever before, but it is an old habit of us to run faster when we have lost our way, and to grasp more fiercely to passing canards. When we have no depth or understanding, we are ornaments on somebody else’s tree.

Whatever merits or failings research, statistics and technical tools may have, they are inanimate things. They are not real people. They may frame an idea but they have no personal meaning beyond a thing. If this seems self-evident, think again. We treat our things better than we treat our people.

The mechanisms of science and technology have chased us from ourselves into the adoration of new tools and toys. Our gullibility is equally evident in our eagerness to accept “scientific pronouncements” with little hesitation. We were once told coffee was bad for our health. The other day we were told coffee is not only good for our health, but it impedes Alzheimer’s disease. The average American drinks less than two cups of coffee a day. It takes five cups of coffee per day to impede this disease. It will be interesting to see if the stock price on coffee futures goes up.

We are buried daily in a sea of factual statistics from the social, behavior and physical sciences, facts which often later prove unreliable, or untrue. This confounds and confuses but should not come as a surprise. In our solution driven culture, ten or more solutions to a problem jump out before the problem has actually been defined. Ergo, it is open season on gullibility.

All You Need is Love

We treat sex as if it is a hostile foreign country. The mind and body are at war with each other. The mind refuses to listen to the body, and the body refuses to listen to the mind. Small wonder why we have trouble connecting. How can we expect to connect with someone else when we refuse to connect with ourselves?

Pornography is an obvious exploitation of this riddle, making the natural perverted and the perverted, natural. We are not content to be silly putty. We have to broadcast it in silly romance novels, television soap operas and situation comedies where sex makes fools of us. And in all this silliness, we have no idea what it means to love.

Love has been assumed to be a motivating force, a power which could be relied upon to push us onward in life to greater happiness and well being with not so much as a nod to caring. If this were not so, we would treat each other better when we say we love them. But it doesn’t stop there.

Why is it so often that people in the caring professions – social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists – hard working though they might be, are so seldom found to be caring people? Well-meaning is a far cry from caring. When you care, you see beyond the client to the individual person, and listen to that person not as an ideal type but as a hurting human being.

Love has been crafted in the narrowest sense to love making, which is not necessarily identical with loving. Advertisers have had a field day with Viagra, the performance enhancing sex stimulant. It is ironic that it appears during the dying days of the Sensate culture. Still, love has become a problem, as greater sex hasn’t led to liberation and greater connection, but instead too often to nihilism, and self-estrangement. Why is that?

Love has become all about control. It is a way to possess, dictate, and dominate, as opposed to a means to unity, trust and union. It caused psychiatrist R. D. Laing to suggest that love is a cover for violence.

The Hand of Culture in the Mix

In this age of transition, none of the supporting beams of the past are either in place, or if in place, reliably up to the task of needed support.

Self-assurance in this rational ordering society no longer holds true. We have become ambiguous stick figures teetering on the brink of ambivalence. Life is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide. We are stuck. We look for experts to guide us only to find these experts are as lost as we are. We are in “No Man’s Land.” We have missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.

It is not totally our fault, but this should give us little comfort.

No certain clan or group created this societal malaise. To grasp what is happening, it might be thought, in geological terms, to resemble a tectonic shift that speeded up since the bourgeois experience of the Victorian period (1837 – 1901).

Victorians, armed with their wealth and military might, gave themselves permission with impunity to ridicule, bully, patronize, and exploit individuals and classes, races and nations they deemed inferior. They looked on war as purification, liberation, and the instrument of hope. Historian Peter Gay reveals this narcissistic sentiment in his book, “Cultivation of Hatred” (1993). Victorian hubris has spread across the Western world as a cultural pandemic.

In many ways, despite this postmodern era of electronic wonders, the vestiges of the Victorian age still contaminate our Western roots. This finds us essentially defenseless as the “schizoid man,” the detached man, which is another way of saying the technological man.

The more we cover the sickness of society with technological man’s creative genius the less relevant we have become to ourselves.

Sorokin notes this, and says, there is no cause for alarm. The transition from the magnificent six-hundred-year day of the Sensate culture to the majestic promise of the six-hundred-year day of the Ideational culture is now in progress. Nothing, he says, can change this as there is nothing we can do about it other than understand what is happening and embrace the opportunities that are unfolding.

Cultures and civilizations are born, prosper, disintegrate and die, and then are reborn in new iterations. We are living in the dying days of the Sensate culture. Sorokin writes:

“The failure is not due to this or that incidental external factor, but has been generated by the system of sensory truth in the process of its own development. The seeds of decay were inherent in the system from the very first, and with its development they began to germinate and grow until they have finally become veritable lethal poisons.” (Crisis of Our Age, pp. 115 – 116).

The “truth” landscape of today is a maze of conveniences, conventions, and instrumental and terminal values. We are currently experiencing the contradictory truths of capitalism and communism, Islam and Christianity, Judaism and other isms. Then there is evolution and creative design, deists and atheists, scientists and Christian Scientists, Catholicism and Protestantism, global warming and globalization, pacifists and hawks, patriots and internationalists, religion and pseudo-religion.

Our sick culture has come to be the way we live and how we solve the problems that perplex us. It is the reason why the lid has come off technological man and has exploded into violence. When truths are not treated as relative, and one truth attempts to suppress or destroy another truth, the world more resembles a pock like rash of volcanoes.

Victorians thought it was self-evident that they were the proper custodians of truth; that it was their duty to the world to be policeman and doctor to its tangled web of deceit and debility, and to cultivate its roots with Victorian wisdom and culture.

The reign of queen Victoria ended with her death in 1901, but the momentum continued. The twentieth century was to become a constant bloodbath of opposing truths. More than 100 million people perished on the battlefields of Europe and Asia in two world wars, and many wars after. Currently, Iraq and Afghanistan have the stamp of Victorian hubris on them, proving how fundamental her legacy on the West has been.

Gay writes,

“They (Victorians) would serve as a cloak to imperialistic military or commercial designs, and were driven by personal devils to be exorcised by self-destructive ventures abroad, by unimpeachable benevolence, by active feelings of guilt over one’s privileged position or a mixture of them all. For centuries, the conviction that Christians had a divine call to convert the world had animated believers.”

Gay add:

“Victorians injected what it touted as scientific rationale for hating or despising outsiders. What came to dominate these rationales for aggressiveness was the argument from race.” (Cultivation of Hatred, p. 69)

Thus far the twenty-first century seems to have departed little from this Victorian mindset much as many would argue otherwise.

The Creative Paradox

When pathology takes on normalcy, ‘schizoid man’ does not require repression. Since this is not schizophrenia, or psychotic behavior, but a state that can be constructive, it has pushed the schizoid personality toward creativity making art out of the sickness.

We see this in the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and Freud, among others. It was the pathology of the age that liberated their genius.

The pathology also pushed others of a more technological bent toward utilitarian inventions, many of which, as mentioned earlier, have made us more detached, sedentary, and mechanical as well as entertained. This phenomenon is not exclusive to cultures in transition, but a common experience when men are allowed by society and convention to operate “out of their minds,” which is, incidentally, the definition of insanity.

Artists have always been intrigued with the archetypal qualities and characteristics that make us human. That is why they are society’s gatekeepers and recorders when society is coming apart as they thrive on chaos and collapse.

Take Orestes by Aeschylus and Faust by Goethe. These works are more than portraits of two demented characters who have wild flights of fantasy, one in Greece in the fifth-century B.C., and the other in eighteenth-century Germany.

In one sense, they represent the struggles of ambivalent man in everyday life. With the poet’s touch of genius, they interpret the ferocity of our minds as we are forced to deal with what it means to grow up, to find our identity, to affirm our power, to find love and create enough space to breathe, and finally to meet and deal with life up to and including our death. Century, race and ethnicity are strangely irrelevant.

One of the advantages of living in a transitional age is nothing is nailed down.

It forces us to rise to the challenges and contradictions, to uncover new meanings to our nature, and to see more deeply into what makes us human. It is uncanny that Aeschylus in the last Sensate culture of our distant pass, and Goethe in the dying Sensate culture of the modern era would write similarly of their times.

Aeschylus is the theological poet of his time like Milton (Paradise Lost) was in the seventeenth and Goethe in the eighteenth century. Orestes portrays the agony of being caught in the contradictory blood feuds of his time, while Faust sells his soul for immediate gratification. Both protagonists ignore the consequences of their actions.

Diagnosis of the Crisis

Explanatory models don’t represent truth personified, but provide a gauge to better understand complexities that defy easy understanding. Freud comes to mind. His explanatory model of the ego, id and superego is catchy. This is even truer in its elaboration with the “reality principle” (ego), “pleasure principle (id), and “morality principle” (superego). The problem with Freud is that he felt a need to reify his model as being “scientific,” which is far from the truth.

German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote the obituary of civilization in his iconoclastic Decline of the West (1918). His explanatory model claimed that civilizations are mortal and have a distinct organic form and grow, mature, and decay according to a predetermined historical cycle. Spengler’s book was commercially but not critically successful. The book did, however, influence Sorokin. He latched unto the cyclic nature of civilization as explained by Spengler. Instead of seeing the death knell of the West, however, he envisioned a cyclic change from one culture to another in an overlapping continuum.

No culture in Sorokin’s explanatory model is mutually exclusive but has common characteristics to all three cultures before it moves into dominance of one. For instance, he shows how the Grecian Sensate culture (500 B.C. to 100 A.D.) moved into Medieval Ideational culture (200 through 800 A.D.), and then into the Renaissance Idealistic culture (900 through 1500 A.D.), and then into the Sensate culture of the Modern Era (1600 to the present).

As in the time of Aeschylus (c. 525 – 456 BC), Sorokin sees us in the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday. The Ideational culture he sees rising like a Phoenix out of the Sensate ashes as society moves from the secular, materialistic and quantitative culture of the scientific age to a more theocratic, spiritual and qualitative culture where humanism and technology become integrated. It has happened before, and he sees it happening again.

After the collapse of the Grecian Sensate culture of Aeschylus, rose the Medieval Ideational culture of Emperor Constantine and the Roman Empire. Christianity, which had been persecuted, was now protected by the state.

Constantine is alleged to have seen a flaming cross in the sky at the river Tiber before going into battle. It was inscribed with the words, “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” He adopted the cross as his banner, and was victorious. With that stroke of serendipity, Christianity became the most powerful religion in the world, and would one day grow to more than one billion souls.

Modern and Postmodern Era and the Changing Nature of Belief

In the Modern Era of the Sensate culture, beginning roughly with the late sixteenth century, the new principle that true reality was objective, quantifiable, value free and sensory became dominant. Protestantism, and science challenged Catholic doctrine and church mythology.

It was a new age. The arts and sciences, philosophy and pseudo-religions, ethics and law flourished. Society took rational measure of social, economic and political organization. Thinking became objective, cognitive, linear and vertical with the emphasis on the empirical and secular with a “this worldly” cast to its perspective. Man, not God, had become the center of man’s consciousness.

Through the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter Reformation, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution, Western society moved swiftly through the Modern to the Postmodern Era.

Conventional religions, which are mainly intuitive, were being challenged by “pseudo-religions” in the Sensate culture with their emphasis on being scientific, rational, empirical and verifiable. Scientology would fit this description. Pseudo-religions have failed, however, to capture many converts as they have been seen to vulgarize the social and humanistic philosophies

Mystics endowed with charismatic appeal, such as Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, the Hebrew prophets, Mohammed, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine and others, found all great religions.

“Pseudo-religions” arise in the Sensate culture based upon “science,” “rationality,” or empirically verified truths. Scientology comes to mind. Pseudo-religions never get anywhere because they vulgarize social and humanitarian philosophy.

The clashes between Islam, Judaism and the Christian West today suggest the emergence of a new synthesis of theocracy in the coming Ideational culture. Sorokin sees this as a movement toward a new spiritual awakening, which may resemble the last Ideational period.

Does his view have credence? Consider this. Seventy years ago, he predicted in Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937) the dullness of our tastes would lead to shocking art, that the drop in our libido would lead to a preoccupation with sex, that the family would disintegrate, students would riot on college campuses, police would be engaged in bloody confrontations with citizens on the streets, that pornography would become mainstream and addictive, and that the bliss for “bigger and better” would run its course while the world would collapse in continuing war, chaos, and genocide.

Economic and political neuroticism would lead to a crisis in the arts and sciences, philosophy and religion; in laws and morals, manners and mores. This would spread across all Western society.

Sorokin claims that when a society’s creative forces are exhausted, the culture either becomes petrified, rigid, uncreative and stuck, or it shifts into another gear and takes off with new creative force and energy that previously lay dormant. We are in this transitory period and the jury is still out on what is next.

TEACHABLE CARING

As the ancient parable states, “Care” is born in the same act as the infant, the source of human tenderness. Love cannot live without “Care.” It is given power by nature’s sense of pain as we come into life. “Care” then becomes the psychological side of love. We feel this pain in our bodies as a child and in our hearts as an adult. Parents know this pain and sense of powerlessness when a child leaves the protective custody of the home too early.

When we say we no longer “Care,” we lose our being, and “Care” is the only way back to life. If I “Care” about life, I will husband my resources with full attention to its welfare, whereas if I do not “Care,” my life will disintegrate. “Care” is the basic construct of human existence. It constitutes man as man. The constancy of the self is guaranteed by “Care.”

Time is not intimidating nor is it fleeting. Time is what makes “Care” possible. It is the fact that we are finite, that we will one day die, that makes “Care” possible.

Yet, there is a clear distinction between “Care” and sentimentality. Sentimentality is thinking about sentiment rather than genuinely experiencing reality. Some people will cry in movies or watching television, but will show no sentiment when they see a homeless person freezing on the street.

Sentimentality glories in tears. It begins with subjectively and ends there. “Care” is caring about something or someone real, and then doing something about it. The caring person is caught up in the experience of the objective thing we “Care” about.

“Care” is what is missing today. It takes many forms, some of which may surprise. For example, “Care” is what young people are fighting when they skip school, or drop out of school, or do drugs, or play house, or go on drinking binges, or steal from their parents or neighbors, or lie about where they are and what they are about, maintaining the cringing, creeping, seeping conviction that nothing matters, that they can’t do anything about it so why give a shit.

“Care” is what pushes young people on the fringe into gangs; young girls into rushing their biological clocks; young boys for thinking with their gonads.

The threatening shadow over all this is apathy, uninvolved in mainstream activities, the relentless grasping for external stimulation. “Care” is the necessary antidote. There is none other. “Care” leads to a productive and fulfilling life.

Should the apathetic person fail to muster this antidote, he may not know it but he is a powder keg sitting on the precarious edge of violence, and possible death at his own hands or the hands of an equally disturbed apathetic person.

The struggle is real as full existence in life is made ever more difficult as the world increasingly becomes mechanical and computerized distancing the individual from meaningful association and therefore from himself.

Apathy is the refusal to accept emptiness though it is everywhere. It is nigh on impossible to maintain human dignity as apathy violates it on every side. Apathy conveniently confuses rights with privileges, failing to recognize that education is a privilege and not a right; a job is a privilege and not a right; a meaningful career is a privilege and not a right; a comfortable existence is a privilege not a right.
Nobody owes us anything. It is a privilege if they befriend us, listen to us, care about us, advise us, guide us, and aid us when we need it, but it is never our right to expect it from anybody.

Failure to understand the difference between privileges and rights drives a wedge between being and becoming. Being is what we are, and it is a process of being to struggle and embrace resistance to get us where we want to go. A bird flies because it embraces the wind. We soar because we embrace adversity and turn challenge into opportunity. Becoming looks to avoid struggle and keeps its eye on the prize while never getting off the dime. Becoming wants to be rich but doesn’t want to take an entry level job, save, sacrifice, study, take risks, and endure pain to get there, all of which being does as a matter of course.

Apathy is always looking for an edge failing to see at its feet that it is surrounded by acres of diamonds. All that is desired and vital to our well being is already at our disposal. Being knows this; becoming avoids this.

Apathy sees some men in full enjoyment of riches and reputation, dignity and authority, happy and in fair frame with wife and children, while it slips off in disgust with aching heart and pangs of powerlessness venting its frustration in virulent epithets. Apathy suffers from the disease of compare and compete. It always looks outside itself for motivation and is always disappointed. Psychiatrist Willard and Marguerite Beecher put it this way in Beyond Success and Failure (1966):

“Competition enslaves and degrades the mind. It is one of the most prevalent and certainly the most destructive of all the many forms of psychological dependence. Eventually, if not overcome, if produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned out, stereotyped individual who is devoid of initiative, imagination, originality and spontaneity. He is humanly dead. Competition produces zombies! Nonentities!” (p.56).

If “Care” is not nurtured, apathy will invade the emptiness, and become the source of this illness. It is so easy for us to be lost in our world, to be cut off from caring for our soul and therefore a contagion to others.

The first sign is the loss of connection with this world, with others, and with ourselves. The myths and symbols of our culture have broken down and have little meaning or relevance. We can easily drift to being on automatic pilot in life, at home, in school, on the job, and throughout the day. We fill our bodies with junk food and spirits that consume our vital organs. We smoke or lull around as if the world owes us a living. While we torture our bodies in this manner, we poison our minds with urban legends, voyeurism and vicarious fixes routing for our favorite teams.

We want life to behave as we see it, not as it is. We take pride in thinking the same as we thought as a child refusing to see how this has shrunk us into micro sized souls. Or we totally escape all the boundaries and barriers of life in hedonistic abandon refusing to acknowledge our growing insensitivity to any stimulant. We have become hollow vessel running on empty.

We listen to the gurus that tell us they have the key to unlock our souls, when theirs are locked up in gods and myths. They play on our heartstrings how they have cut the Gordian knot by exiling suspicion, fantasy, and doubt, and opening life to a world of utter tranquility. They do this while being aloof and detached. This has been the doctrine of the Stoics and Epicureans for thousands of years, reinterpreted by these gurus, yet there has never been more anxiety and depression.

The irony is that these gurus in their passion to explain away the myths are forced to fall into myth making. They talk of progress, which is killing our planet; how wealth brings health, when the wealthy are often as sick as the poor; how struggle and pain can be avoided when they are essential to growth; how stress can be eradicated when stress is essential to life – it is distress that is the culprit; how spiritual man is the answer when they are consumed with economic man, or why would they be on the circuit? They see themselves as the answer to the Four Horses of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence and death, while they perpetuate their myths.

They embody technological man and that is why they have such large audiences. They are the rationalists with a religion message of health and well being. They would make emotions respond to rational demands as anxiety and dread are cured with understanding and anecdote. They are mythmakers with whom we are well acquainted.

It is the spiritual side of man that makes him human. The material side has reduced the planet to a garbage dump with its sickening redolent perfume; caused a leak in the ozone layer, created global warming; and has led to tankers loaded with nuclear waste under the cover of darkness wandering the seas like the Flying Dutchman, a man without a country, looking for a place to drop their poison.

We feel before we think, feeling is the basis of human existence.

Love starts with caring, and caring starts with feeling. Feeling transports us beyond our egos. Feeling is the way we relate to reality and others. American psychologist William James put it simply, “Feeling is everything.” James doesn’t mean that there is nothing more than feeling, but that everything starts with feeling. Feeling commits one, ties one to the object, and ensures some kind of action. We often call it love, but only because we are not comfortable identifying it as a feeling.

In this scientific age feelings have been relegated to subjective status and so value cluttered that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Reason, not feelings, has become the ultimate reality, and look where reason has gotten us.

When confused or angry, we don’t take responsibility for our feelings. We take offense; seldom stopping to ask ourselves why we are upset. Instead of taking umbrage, we might say, “What you said offends me, you hurt my feelings by not respecting me.” Attack what the person said, and take responsibility for your anger, but don’t attack the person.

When we are upset, angry, disappointed or embarrassed, we should not direct our emotions at the person, but at the offending behavior. We should value the person but be appalled at the behavior. It is the behavior, not the person, per se, that offends us. Like all such behavior, there may be more than a grain of truth to what has been said, explaining why we are upset. Criticism when coached in caring terms can make our feelings work for us.

We cannot know ourselves except as to how we feel.

Descartes didn’t do us a favor by saying, “I think, therefore I am.” He should have said, “I feel, therefore I am.” Thinking follows feeling, not the other way around. Scientists can be crippled by feelings the same as us. In fact, feelings can sometimes be more crippling for them because they deny feelings with pride.

We are subjective actors to our environment no matter how subtlety our minds have been developed.

Consider Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (1952) and Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” (1946).

Godot does not come. Vladimir and Estragon wait forever and the problem remains. Beckett forces us to look more deeply into our condition as men. He shocks us into awareness of our human significance, all to make us feel. We find ourselves caring for the tramps despite the apparent meaningless of their situation. Godot does not come, but in the waiting there is care and hope. Beckett is saying, waiting is caring, and caring is hoping.

Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” tells the same story from another perspective. It is Harry Hope’s bar and hardware salesman Theodore “Hickey” Hickman’s birthday. It is a time when Hickey’s hopes, dreams and pipe dreams have all disintegrated into the self-knowledge that greatness has fled from him forever. At this point, in this heavy state of morose, it seems no longer a play and we are swept up into a vacuum of despair. Hickey is in a paradox state of meaning in meaninglessness. The vacuum, the emptiness, and the apathy are the tragic facts that embrace audience and actors alike. The emoting on stage has taken on a life of its own. These actors feel strangely real to us in their own lives, which have now become a part of ours.

T. S. Eliot captures this contradictory situation with these lines:

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting,
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.”
(Four Quartets, p. 15)

Often artists dwell on nihilism to stoke the boilers for relevance, to transcend superficiality for substance, to penetrate the mythos of “Care” to enable us to feel, to stand ready against cynicism and apathy, to take the high ground of authenticity in relationships, to shed the morality of appearance and form, to seek an honest and genuine connection with others, to feel, to touch, and to look one in the eye and share hopes and dreams without embarrassment, to simply sit in silence and take in the natural light without language, to simply feel connected. No feeling is more embracing for “Care” than this.


Sources: James R. Fisher, Jr., “A Look Back To See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007); Pitrim Sorokin, “The Crisis of Our Age” (Dutton 1941); Martin Heidegger, “Being and Time” (Harper & Row 1962); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Faust” (Alfred A. Knopf 1964); Rollo May, “Love and Will” (Norton 1969); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land” (unpublished); Peter Berger, et al, “The Homeless Mind” (Random House 1973); R. D. Laing, “The Facts of Life” (Ballantine Books 1973); Peter Gay, “The Cultivation of Hatred” (Norton 1993); Aeschylus, “Agamemnon” (University of Chicago Press 1953); John Milton, “Paradise Lost” (Penguin Classics 2003); Oswald Spengler,“Decline of the West” (Modern Library 1965); F. Van der Meer, “The Faith of the Catholic Church” (Dimension Books 1966); Pitrim Sorokin, “Social and Cultural Dynamics”( Porter Sargent 1937); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Confident Thinking” (unpublished); Willard and Marguerite Beecher, “Beyond Success and Failure” (Pocket Books 1966); Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot” (Faber & Faber 1998); Eugene O’Neill, “The Iceman Cometh” (Vintage 1957); T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets (Harcourt, Brace 1943)