Wendell Berry and Wholeness

In an earlier post, I reflected on the connection between holiness and wholeness, discussing the notion that the mechanization of modern societies detract both from a sense of the sacred and from a life of unity and wholeness. I’d like to return to the holiness and wholeness theme now, describing some contributions by Christian agrarian writer Wendell Berry, who, as I mentioned in another post, I have been reading.

The first post had been prompted by a comment in Fredric Morton’s book Thunder at Twilight that Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, was “starved for the wholeness that is holiness.” As Morton describes it, Princip’s ancestors were peasants who were tied to the land and thereby to the sacred. His father, however, was displaced from the land, and Princip himself was a student who, absent traditional roots, was seeking to root himself in Serbian nationalism.

If passion for Serbia seems a thin soil in which to put down roots, Berry points out that most of us have roots that run no deeper. In his essay “The Body and the Earth” (found in the collection, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry), he laments that we have lost the ancient insight that humans are only a small part of Creation. In most traditional cultures, “a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair.” With the rise of industry, we removed ourselves from the wilderness, transforming it into scenery. “We became less and less capable of sensing ourselves as small within Creation, partly because we thought we could comprehend it statistically, but also because we were becoming creators, ourselves, of a mechanical creation by which we felt ourselves greatly magnified.” Thus, we lost the wholeness and holiness that comes from experiencing the majesty of Creation and perceiving our place within it. An irony of the magnification of humanity that has come with assuming the role of creator is that individual humans are diminished, overshadowed by the machines we have constructed.

Later in the same essay, Berry suggests that an even more profound lack of wholeness has been occasioned by the isolation of the body from the soul. In our religion, he suggests, we have valued the soul and devalued the body, a division that permits us to assign demeaning and numbing tasks to our bodies (or, more often, to the bodies of others) without compunction. However, such a division leads to neither wholeness nor holiness, but to fragmentation and isolation. As Berry puts it:

“By dividing body and soul, we divide both from all else. We thus condemn ourselves to a loneliness for which the only compensation is violence—against other creatures, against the earth, against ourselves.”

Berry argues that, in separating ourselves from the natural order and our bodies from our souls, we have inevitably produced another division, that between the sexes. In an industrial society, he suggests, the tasks of nurturing family members and managing the household are relegated exclusively to women. It is here that he thinks we can start mending our brokenness and find some degree of wholeness and holiness. We can, he says, work to rebuild the household as a place of mutual dependence and obligation, “requiring skill, moral discipline, and work.” Such a household is a fitting venue for the marital and sexual bonds between husband and wife. As he envisions it, the well-functioning household is productive (of offspring, but also of food, shelter, and “well-made things”) and serves as a place of embodiment that is both whole and holy.

 

Day of Woe

I got most of the way through this day before running across a report that today is ostensibly the most depressing day of the year.  Apparently, a few years ago British psychologist Cliff Arnall identified the third Monday in January as such, based not on any empirical evidence showing that we are all in the pits that day, but on a rationalistic analysis having to do with time elapsed since Christmas, failed New Year’s resolutions, bleak weather, and the like.  Yes, it’s junk science, but where would my discipline of psychology be without occasional meaningless calculations like this?

 I was actually feeling pretty good today.  I’m off work, the weather is beautiful, and I’m looking forward to the year to come.  Learning that this day is supposed to be the most depressing actually lifts my mood more.  If this is a bad day, the good days to come are bound to be really great!  I can’t wait until June 18, which Dr. Arnall predicts will be the happiest day this year!

 

Job Satisfaction

The Conference Board released a report a few weeks ago reporting that Americans like their jobs less than they used to.  A survey of 5,000 U.S. households found that only 45.3% of respondents were satisfied with their jobs.  In 1987, when this annual survey was first given, 61.1% reported they were satisfied with their work.  In the most recent survey, satisfaction was roughly the same for the different age groups surveyed, with the exception that the youngest workers (those under 25) were the least satisfied group by a considerable margin.  Only 35.7% of them claimed to be satisfied.  The summary available on the Conference Board website states that the four major components included in the survey–job design, organizational health, managerial quality, and extrinsic rewards—all showed decreases.  Here’s a few details that I got from a Yahoo! article about the Conference Board report:

• 51% of workers said they like their boss
• 56% said they like their co-workers
• 43% said they feel secure in their jobs

All these figures were lower than for the 1987 survey.

The board’s summary expresses concern over how increasing dissatisfaction could affect productivity and retention.  Shouldn’t we also be concerned about how it will affect the well-being of the workers?  Economic health is important, but so is emotional health.

One could argue that the reason the younger workers were so dissatisfied may be that many of them either took whatever job they could get or are still searching for a compatible niche in the workplace.  Perhaps these workers will have increased satisfaction in future years.  Maybe so, but in 1987, when the same dynamics would presumably have been present, 55.7% of those under 25 were satisfied with their work, 20% higher than the current crop of under-25 workers.  The decrease for this age cohort was greater than for any other cohort except for workers over 65.

I was particularly interested in this study since I noted in an earlier post that many people I know find meaning in their jobs.  Can my observation be reconciled with the low satisfaction figures found in this study?   I don’t have as much contact with under-25 workers as I do with older employees, so my statement wasn’t based on the most disgruntled cohort.  Also, it may be that many of the people I have talked to were dissatisfied with their jobs despite finding meaning in them.  I can think of jobs I’ve had in which I was unhappy with the pay or disliked my supervisor, but still enjoyed the work and was gratified that my work seemed to contribute to the well-being of others.  I liked what I did, but wasn’t satisfied with some of the conditions of employment.

That being said, perhaps my earlier post underestimated the amount of unhappiness there is in the workplace.  It saddens me to read of the dissatisfaction of young workers.  Unless they can find more interesting work, or find a way to take interest in the work they are doing, many of them may have many bleak decades of drudgery ahead of them.

 

Up in the Air II: How to Fire Employees

In my earlier post about the movie Up in the Air, I mentioned by didn’t discuss the work done by Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), the film’s protagonist: he travels around the country firing people for employers who don’t have the courage to drop the ax themselves.  Wouldn’t it take a monster, or at the least someone who is unmoved by human suffering, to tell dozens of people a day that they no longer have a job?  The director, Jason Reitman, takes pains to show that Ryan’s approach to his work is one of the better things about him.  Still, that doesn’t mitigate the impact of what he does on the lives of others.

When telling a person that he or she no longer has a job, Ryan’s manner is straightforward but pleasant, avoiding apologies and euphemisms.  He does his homework about the person and their employment in advance, and in conveying the bad news attends to the person’s response, adapting his approach to fit the situation.  As consolation, he often says something like, “Anyone who built an empire or changed the world sat where you are right now.  They wouldn’t have been able to do what they did if they hadn’t been here.”  The implication is that the person can grow from the experience.  This encouraging word is stated in a less grating manner than the positive-thinking claptrap that his young coworker Natalie (Anna Kendrick) spews during her first efforts to fire employees.   Ryan teaches Natalie by example and instruction.  For example, he wise counsels her not to express feelings of sympathy, since any distress she may be experiencing is nothing compared to what the person being fired is going through.  He seeks to preserve dignity, and sees himself as assisting the person being dismissed to navigate a potentially perilous passage.  As he puts it to Natalie, “We have to make limbo tolerable.”  He believes strongly that those being fired deserve to be told face-to-face by someone to whom they can vent their anger or despair, a belief that puts him at odds with Natalie’s recommendation, endorsed by his boss, that in order to save costs all firings be done by video conferencing.

Natalie (Anna Kendrick) and Ryan (George Clooney) on the job.

So Ryan has an ethic that he brings to his work, and tries to aid the adjustment of those he fires.  He is by no means a monster.  Yet what he does devastates people.  Right after the opening credits, we see one person after another reacting to being fired.  They are shocked, disbelieving, angry, saddened, questioning, frightened, desperate, or various combinations of the above.  As Reitman tells a reporter in this interview, the people showing such reactions were not actors but people in Detroit or St. Louis who had recently been dismissed from their jobs.  These former employees were told that the filmmakers would “fire” them again on camera, “and we’d like you to respond the way you did the day you lost your job, or perhaps the way you wish you had responded.”  The reactions, one after another, are incredibly poignant.  These are the faces of the millions in our country who have been tossed from the workforce.  Our jobs are central to the meaning we make of our lives; just as devastating as the financial loss is the loss of purpose

How could someone fire people day after day with equanimity?  Maybe it’s not helpful to show outward sympathy when firing someone, but not many of us could pull the rug out from under one person after another without any sign of discomfort.  To be unmoved by the suffering of others may not make one a bad person, but it certainly suggests some deficiency in basic human decency.  I’m impressed that Mr. Clooney portrayed the unappealing aspects of the character without flinching, yet still evoked sympathy for him from the viewer.

Yesterday I ran across an interesting essay analyzing the movie using the sociological theories of Max Weber and Robert Merton.  It suggests that the characters are enmeshed in the sort of impersonal rationalized systems that Weber decries, then adds the possibility that they partly retain a sense of humanity and connectedness via using technologies of social networking.  I’m not convinced by the latter point, but the essay is worth reading.

 

Up in the Air

I recently saw Up in the Air, written and directed by Jason Reitman.  The movie stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, whose job is to travel around the country, firing workers for corporations who don’t want to perform the dirty deed themselves.  Rather than lamenting that the bulk of his life is spent in airplanes and hotels (by his count, 322 days on the road over the past year), Ryan revels in being peripatetic.  In fact, traveling defines his identity and serves as his home.  As he puts it,  “To know me is to fly with me.  This is where I live.”

The movie’s title refers not only to Ryan’s travel schedule but to his unwillingness to tie himself down to a place or to another person.  He articulates this aversion to commitment in the motivational speeches he gives to business groups.  He starts with a backpack and asks each audience member to imagine filling the pack with all their possessions and relationships. As he points out, we couldn’t move if we tried shouldering such a burden.  He advises, “You don’t have to carry all that weight.”  True to this philosophy, he is unmarried, has no children, has only a sparse, one-bedroom apartment that is less personal than the hotel rooms he usually inhabits, and travels with no more than a couple changes of clothes, having culled his baggage down to a single wheeled carry-on.  He assiduously avoids connections (other than the sort linking one flight to the next).  At one point, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a younger colleague who has been sent on the road with him to learn about the business of firing others, asks why it never crosses his mind whether a relationship with a woman might have a future.  Ryan answers with a question: “You know that moment when you look in somebody’s eyes and you can feel them staring into your soul and the whole world goes quiet?”

“Yes,” Natalie says.

“Right, well I don’t,” Ryan concludes.  He’s obviously glad to be spared such passion.  The passions he does have are impersonal: for airports, for the perks he gets as a regular traveler, and, especially, for accumulating frequent-flyer miles.  His goal—he is hesitant to share this with others, suggesting it is a deep yearning of the soul—is to accumulate ten million American Airlines miles.

One night while on the road, Ryan meets and beds Alex (Vera Farmiga), another apparently rootless wanderer who wants sex without obligation and without any trace of romance.  She is Ryan’s equal in detachment.  She tells him at one point, “Think of me as you, only with a vagina.”  Subsequently, they coordinate their schedules so they can share rambunctious but impersonal sex from time to time.

Does disengagement and casual sex work as a way of life?  Despite Ryan’s professed satisfaction, there are signs he isn’t entirely comfortable with his isolation.  He reminisces with Alex about his high school days; though his tone is ironic, there is evidence of a desire to be known by another.  He shows some vulnerability with Jim, his sister’s fiancé who is struggling with whether or not to marry.  It seems at one point that he is ready to seek closeness, though the movie is too honest to let him cave in to sentiment.

Reitman doesn’t tell us much about what made Ryan so avoidant of relationships, though one core dynamic seems present.  When Natalie questions him about his lack of relatedness, Ryan mentions that his grandparents were put in a nursing home and died there, and the same thing happened to his parents.  “We all die alone,” he concludes, but adds, mockingly, “except those cult members in San Diego with the Kool Aid.”  Why build connections with others, why marry or have children, if you will lose it all eventually?  Ward off the fear of death by not forming  attachments whose eventual rupture will cause you pain.  Minimize the terror of dying by not really living. An unacknowledged fear of death explains more than just Ryan’s avoidance of connections.  His accumulation of miles, for example, is a simulacrum of the accumulation of wealth that psychoanalyst Norman O. Brown regards as a response throughout history to the universal urge for immortality.  And his job of firing workers can be seen as a type of human sacrifice, which Ernest Becker in Escape from Evil describes as a way of affirming one’s power over life and death.

I have recently been reading a book of Wendell Berry’s essays; Berry considers the sort of impoverishment of connections and dis-place-ment that Ryan shows to be how the great majority of Americans live their lives.  Berry’s commitment to land and to place also prompt in him a view of death much different from that common in America.  I’ll discuss those issues and also say more about Ryan’s firing of workers in future posts.

 

A Serious Man

How well does life work if you are narrowly and brainlessly self-serving?  The Coen brothers asked that question in Burn after Reading last fall.  The answer: not so well.  This fall’s follow-up question seems to be, “Does it work any better to strive after righteousness, to seek God, to try to be A Serious Man?”  Their answer seems to be that, no, that doesn’t work out very well either. 

A Serious Man is said to be the movie in the Coen’s canon that most explores their Midwestern Jewish origins.  The movie was released in early October, but only made it to Fayetteville a few weeks ago.  I saw it this Wednesday.  The movie begins with a brief prologue: a Jewish couple in a 19^th Century Eastern European shtetl have an encounter with an old acquaintance who may or may not be a dybbuk, the soul of a dead person, and in consequence they may or may not be subject to a curse.  The uncertainty about what happened is certainly intentional.  Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor at a Midwestern college in 1967 (and who may be a descendent of the couple and thus saddled with their curse) is first seen lecturing about Schrodinger’s cat.  Is the cat alive or dead?  Who knows?  In a later dream sequence, Larry proves Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to the class, concluding that we can’t ever know what’s really going on, “So it shouldn’t bother you.  Although you’ll be responsible for this on the midterm.” 

Despite dispensing such advice, Larry has trouble accepting the uncertainties of his own imploding life.  His wife Judith tells him she has grown close to Sy Ableman, an unctuous widower, and wants a divorce so she and Sy can marry.  His overweight, inept brother Albert is camped out on his couch.  His son Danny, preparing for his bar mitzvah between puffs of marijuana, badgers Larry about their poor TV reception.   His daughter steals from his wallet.  The neighbor on one side of his suburban ranch encroaches on his property line; the neighbor on the other side is a Bathsheba-like temptress who sunbathes in the nude.  A student tries to bribe him for a passing grade.  The student’s father threatens a lawsuit.  Someone writes letters to the tenure committee accusing Larry of moral turpitude.  And a record club is dunning him to pay for records he never ordered.   What diminishes Larry even more than the initial blows are the indignities that follow.  Larry may want to be a serious man, but no one takes him seriously.  Having your wife taken is bad enough; you shouldn’t have to endure her lover bringing you bottle of wine to compensate and hugging you in feigned sympathy.  And why should you be  exiled first from your bedroom and then from the house so that the marital tension won’t be awkward for the children?  How do you handle it when your unfaithful wife hires a rapacious law firm to demand the lion’s share of your meager assets? (In discussing his case with his lawyer, Larry says that he’s sure that Sy and Judith aren’t sexually involved, so their relationship can’t be used in the legal proceedings.  As in many Coen films, the boundary between innocence and stupidity is not well marked.)    

Larry wants to discover why “Heshem” (God) is treating him so harshly.  Rabbi Scott, the junior rabbi at the synagogue, admits that it’s difficult to understand divine intentions, but insists “with the right perspective you can see Heshem.”  He illustrates by showing Larry the parking lot, which, he says, is extraordinary or ordinary, depending on your perspective.  Or something like that.  Not surprisingly, Larry isn’t consoled by the sight of parked cars.

Rabbi Nachter responds to Larry’s questions by telling a rambling story about a Jewish dentist who found “Help me” written in Hebrew on the inner surfaces of a goy’s teeth.  Puzzled, the dentist consulted the rabbi, who had few answers: “The teeth, don’t know. A sign from Hashem, don’t know.  Helping others: couldn’t hurt.”  The dentist eventually goes on with life, and that’s what the rabbi advises Larry to do:  “These questions that are bothering you, Larry — maybe they’re like a toothache. We feel them for a while, then they go away.”  

Exasperated, Larry tries to see Marshak, the reputably wise senior rabbi.  Marshak’s secretary refuses to let Larry in, saying, “He’s busy.”  Larry, having caught a glimpse of Marshak sitting quietly at his desk, complains, “He doesn’t look busy.”  The imperious response is, “He’s thinking.”

So Larry is left without answers.  The movie lurches towards darkness and despair, but we are offered two bits of advice that may or may not be intended as lifelines.  First, an aphorism is shown before the opening scene: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.”  Second, near the end of the movie, a character (I won’t give away who) quotes the Jefferson Airplane: “When the truth is found to be lies and all hope within you dies….”    Anyone who lived through the sixties knows what follows: “Don’t you want somebody to love/ Don’t you need somebody to love/ Wouldn’t you love somebody to love/ You better find somebody to love.”  The Coen’s message seems to be that, when faced with tragedy and absurdity, the best you can do is to accept and love.  Maybe that’s what makes one a serious man.  Larry hasn’t found acceptance.  As for love, when Arthur, immersed in problems of his own making, tearfully proclaims that Larry’s life is better than his then runs out the door, Larry, clad in his underwear, chases his distraught brother through the grounds of the run-down motel where they are staying and embraces him, giving words of comfort, while they sit together on the steps of the empty swimming pool.   Love is found in strange places, but it seems to be all that either of them have.

 

Happiness is a Wonderful Wedding

Two weeks ago, my son Elliot and his girlfriend Mary were married.  The wedding was in Bellingham, Washington, and flying across the country and back in the middle of a semester has put me behind.  Thus, I haven’t written any blog entries recently.  I would like to post a few photos from the wedding.  In preparing this post, I thought of the joy that the wedding produced for those in attendance, and was reminded of Charles Schultz’s first book, Happiness is a Warm Puppy.

 

So here goes: a Peanuts-inspired view of the goings-on.

My flight got in late Thursday.  My other son, James, his wife Jenn, and their boys Calvin and Theo were already there.  I went to their motel room Friday morning.   For Theo, happiness was getting to watch his favorite cartoon while simultaneously rubbing his belly button:

For Calvin, happiness was having a swimming pool in the motel:

Later in the day, we had lunch with Elliot and got to see the apartment where the two of them will be living.  The rehearsal was that afternoon, followed by the rehearsal dinner at an Italian restaurant in downtown Bellingham:

That night, happiness was seeing my sister and her husband for the first time since May . . .

. . . and spending more time with Jas, Jenn, Theo, and Calvin.

The wedding was Saturday afternoon, following a few hours with the photographer.   Happiness is having sunshine for the first time all week, brightening pictures of the wedding party:

Happiness is also being relaxed enough to clown around an hour before the ceremony:

Happiness is a bride walking down the aisle:

 Happiness is promising to love the one whose eyes you’re gazing at. . .

. . . then being presented to everyone as husband and wife.

There’s more, of course–the toasts, the cake, the first dance, and then, a few days later, the Hawaiian honeymoon.  Elliot and Mary, I wish you happiness together.  For me, happiness is having two sons I’m proud of and two wonderful daughters-in-law.

 

Wholeness and Holiness

I recently read Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 by Frederic Morton.  I was fascinated by the confluence of the decrepit Habsburg monarchy, the entrenched aristocracy, the socialist and communist revolutionaries, and the psychoanalytic establishment all within the confines of prewar Vienna (the book concludes with Austria and the other European powers going to war in August, 1914).  In a passage I found thought-provoking, Morton describes Viennese political writer Karl Kraus’ analysis of the assassination of Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip.  The assassination, thought Kraus, was not the work of a single man, of a subversive organization, or even a nation, for: “No less a force than progress stands behind this deed—progress and education unmoored from God. . .”  

Morton thinks that the progress that Kraus was alluding to was the progress of modernization and industrialization.  Princip’s ancestors had lived for centuries in a zadruga, a Bosnian farming community.  His father, displaced from the land, had earned his living as a postman.  Thus, the family was dislocated not only from farm and community but from the spirituality of nature.  The next generation was even more estranged.  As Morton puts it:

 “His son Gavrilo, more educated than his father, more sensitive, more starved for the wholeness that is holiness and thus more resentful of the ruins all about him, had to seek another garden.  He sought something that would satisfy his disorientation and his anger; something which, as his readings of Nietzsche suggested, would restore the valor of the vital principle that his race had lost.” (p. 319)

 Princip found as his guiding principle hatred of the Austrians who occupied Bosnia.  He sought to drive out the Austrians and reclaim Bosnia as a Slavic land.  Even if this enterprise had proved successful, though, it could never have restored his grandparents’ Eden, for that had been lost to modernity.

 I was particularly struck by Morton’s diagnosis of Princip’s plight: he was “starved for the wholeness that is holiness.”  What is the connection between holiness and wholeness, and how does modernity deprive of that wholeness?  Kraus seems to have believed that God is experienced via the natural world, and the mechanization and industrialization of modern societies exclude God and thereby the holy from our lives, leaving us fragmented.  Were he to see our lives today, I imagine that he would think that the alienation of the spirit that was already proceeding rapidly in 1914 has not slacked its pace since then. 

 My thoughts about the modern diminishment of both holiness and wholeness were given additional impetus by a posting on a listserv for therapists to which I subscribe.  Dr. Mark Stern, the author of the post, expressed concern that modern technology has changed psychotherapy, intruding on the “sacred Sabbath of the psychotherapy hour.”  He described the resulting loss in exactly the same language of wholeness and holiness that Morton uses:

 “I’m not at all sure the ways in which the paradox of wholeness/holiness has become distanced from these times. Personally, I fear that the robotization of what is still referred to as therapy (though, in reality, behavioral manipulation), has placed some closure on the sacredness of the individual. In place of depth affirmation of inner life; of embodied vision and of the practice of delving into the richness of latent knowledge, the standards of manualized techniques have moved away from the mysteries.”

 The therapist’s office no longer serves as a sanctuary from the ruin wrought by the machine; it has largely been mechanized itself, so that the refugees seeking solace there are simply subjected to one more technology.

 We live in unholy times—times when the sacred is given short shrift.  Many still have a yearning for holiness and wholeness, as evidenced by the popularity of seeker-friendly churches, religious ritual, and new-age spirituality.  Like Humpty-Dumpty, though, we aren’t put together again very readily.  I hope to reflect in a later post on what is conducive to the wholeness that stems from holiness.

 

Travel, Meaning, and Happiness

In his blog The Quest for a Good Life, psychologist Andy Tix recently wrote about his reasons for taking a teaching sabbatical this semester in Scotland.  In brief, he and his wife want to jointly experience the sort of growth that can come about living in an unfamiliar place and interacting with people different from those they usually encounter.  He notes that resettling his family in Edinburg for the duration has been fraught with challenges.  In this regard, he cites Rob Bell’s most recent book Drops Like Stars.  He indicates that Bell suggests “discomfort and suffering often lead to raw experiences that often make life most meaningful and which often bond people together.”  Andy reflects that many people yearn for new and challenging experiences, but shy away from actually taking on challenges because they anticipate hardship and uncertainty. 

I admit that I’m much more prone to daydream about seeking out new challenges than in taking them on.   I do seek out some adventures, but admittedly they are fairly tame.  Andy is spending time in a different cultural setting than he is used to; I like to travel as well, but so far have made only brief trips mostly to destinations where the cultural heritage is not entirely dissimilar to mine.  I notice that even my timid venturing forth is more than some people do.  Last summer, I went on my first cruise, sailing to Italy, Greece, and Turkey with my son, who had been a cruise line employee the previous two summers, thereby making us eligible for a hugely discounted fare. I was struck by how many of the passengers avoided cultural dissonance, seeking out only the picture-postcard sort of experiences that they could assimilate into their already-existing cultural frame.   Riding into Athens inside a well-appointed, air-conditioned coach and getting out at the Acropolis to click a few pictures of the Parthenon may have been travel in the physical sense, but psychically the cruisers weren’t traveling at all, at least not if travel entails leaving the familiar behind  and venturing into the unknown.    To Piaget’s terms, journeys always put the traveler in a place where it’s impossible to assimilate the people and places being experienced into preexisting schemas.  The traveler is forced to accommodate—to create new categories or modify existing ones. 

In describing how his sojourn in Scotland has been affecting him, Andy cited Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between happiness in the moment and the general perception that one has a happy life.  His day-to-day experience of Scotland hasn’t produced many happy moments; in fact, the adjustment had been rather difficult.  However, he has been living in such a way that his conception of the world is changing—the vessels into which his days in Scotland have been poured aren’t adequate to the task, and as a result are being replaced by new, more capacious containers.  New wine has a way of demanding new wineskins.  Does this constitute happiness in the larger sense?  I think it fits best with the Aristotelian concept of happiness as eudiamonia (a life well-lived and suitable to our natural function).  At least in my case, there is more of a sense that I’m living well and wisely when new experiences are trampling on my preconceptions than when I am just pacing within the narrow parameters of the quotidian.

 

Loneliness

Recently I wrote a post on Dorothy Day’s quasi-autobiography The Long Loneliness.  A few days later, I ran across this Newsweek article on loneliness in American society.  The news on the loneliness front is bad:  we’re getting more lonely all the time.  For example, over a twenty-year period, there was a three-fold increase in the number of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters. 

Loneliness is not the same thing as being alone.   The definition of loneliness given by the article is the same one used in most psychological research on the subject, namely that it is “an aversive emotional response to a perceived discrepancy between a person’s desired levels of social interaction and the contact they’re actually receiving.”  I have thought about whether the definition fit me.   I live alone and spend quite a bit of time by myself but am seldom lonely.  I actually would like somewhat more social interaction than I have, but not with the people readily available for that interaction.  (What I would like is to have more contact with people who live some distance away.)   It never made much sense to me to lament not having more interaction with others, and I do manage to fill much of my time alone with things that I either enjoy or think are useful.  My experience suggests that it is possible to have the discrepancy that the definition refers to without also having the “aversive emotional response.” 

The Newsweek article makes a number of fairly obvious points about loneliness persisting for many in our society despite increased electronic connections with others.  Facebook and MySpace provide only a thin sense of community.  Looking at Facebook can be the occasion for comparing one’s pathetic social involvement to the great relationships that everyone else seems immersed in, thereby evoking increased loneliness.  Sure, we know that Facebook Walls just present the most superficial of facades—they really do serve as walls that hide more than they reveal—but the stories they tell at least contain actors and scenes that seem much better than anything going on in our lives. 

On the other hand, perhaps the problem isn’t so much that social network sites are the relational equivalent of junk food as that, in both online and face-to-face interactions, we aren’t looking for what is most sustaining–a genuine encounter with another human being.  What Dorothy Day did much better than I or most people I know was to get outside the confines of self and take interest in others.  Her descriptions of the people that flowed through the hospitality houses, farms, and factories she frequented are the richest chapters of her memoir.  Exploring and cherishing the uniqueness of each person was an effective salve for her loneliness.  It’s a prescription that perhaps could benefit many in our age of isolation.