Category: Andrew Fiala Blog

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To be human is to be a work in progress. Human beings grow, change, and fail. That’s why we need compassion and forgiveness.

We ought to give people a break, show some patience, and stop scolding one another. No one is perfect. This goes for other people and ourselves.

But we remain strangely wedded to the idea that people should be perfect. Sometimes this appears as pearl-clutching indignation when other people say dumb things and behave badly. Social media is full of holier-than-thou outrage. It comes in a variety of flavors, liberal and conservative, woke and anti-woke.

Turned inward, perfectionism becomes pathological. In social contexts, it fuels anger and polarization. Let’s climb down from our high horses, study compassion, and look at ourselves in the mirror.

Pathological perfectionism in sports

Perfectionism can crack that mirror. Some people are incredibly hard on themselves. A mirror can magnify our flaws. Pathological perfectionism can lead to eating disorders, self-loathing, and even suicide.

One alarming example is the shocking number of recent suicides by college athletes. Last month, a 19-year-old cheerleader at Southern University ended her own life. From the outside, these young folks seem to be excelling and achieving. But at what cost?

Suicide is complex. The mental health of young people has been battered in recent years, and perfectionism is part of the problem, especially for athletes and other over-achievers. The quest for perfection can lead to despair.

The stress of perfectionism was part of the story of Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, who withdrew from competition at the summer games in Tokyo. A New York Times article about Biles was headlined “The Weight of Perfection.”

Another recent article about elite athletes and mental health, “The Problem with Perfection,” cites research suggesting that one-third of elite athletes suffer from anxiety and depression. Athletic perfection demands constant effort, self-critique, and the ever-present risk of failure.

The competitive spirit is linked to deep psychological forces. Tennis star Andre Agassi once explained, “I’ve internalized my father—his impatience, his perfectionism, his rage—until his voice doesn’t just feel like my own, it is my own.” The sidelines of youth sports are full of parents who scream at their own kids. Few will be as great as Agassi. But some will internalize the rage and impatience of pathological perfectionism.

Fear of failure is part of the mix. In describing those recent student-athlete suicides, sports columnist Shalise Manza Young suggested, “Maybe you believe you must be perfect in everything you attempt and any perceived failure is unbearable.” The mother of one of those student-athletes explained, “There’s so much pressure on athletes, especially at that high level, balancing academics and a highly competitive environment. And there is anxiety and there is stress to be perfect, to be the best, to be No. 1.”

The danger of the GOAT

Our culture reinforces this mindset. Most recently it has taken the form of the acronym “GOAT,” for “Greatest Of All Time.” That superlative is obviously absurd. But fans are obsessed with this kind of assertion.

As coach and philosopher Jack Bowen has noted, the truth of athletic competition is that there is only one winner at a time, only one MVP per season, only one gold medalist per event per Olympiad. And everyone loses eventually. Even the MVPs grow old and eventually lose. No one wins everything or stays on top for long.

RELATED: Sports are for losers: On unavoidable suffering and learning to flourish

When the struggle for perfection runs into the inevitable fact of loss and failure, there is a recipe for trauma and despair. One need not be a world-class athlete to understand what it means to pursue greatness. The struggle to be perfect takes a toll on academic overachievers, on musicians, in the business world, and elsewhere.

There is only one winner at a time, only one MVP per season, only one gold medalist per event per Olympiad.

Our culture celebrates GOATs, and we pile on to scapegoats. The danger of chasing the title of GOAT is that you’ve got a target on your back. The more successful you become, the more enemies you create, and the more fragile your perfection becomes.

The menace of merit

Pathological perfectionism exists wherever there are meritocracies.

Academia is plagued by the problem. Helicopter dads and tiger moms urge their kids up the academic ladder. The recent PBS documentary “Try Harder!” chronicled the anxiety of youth who dream of Ivy League perfection. One student said, “the pressure is insurmountable at times.”

When those overachievers land in universities, the competition redoubles. They compete for entrance to law schools, medical schools, and Ph.D. programs. Then these young “goats” move on to intense competition for residencies, partnerships, and tenure-track jobs, only to pass their perfectionism on to their own children. The motto of meritocracy is publish or perish, eat or be eaten.

In The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel, cites research indicating a “hidden epidemic of perfectionism” among the youth. In a meritocracy, “the demand to achieve comes to define one’s merit and self-worth.” Sandel continues, “Among those who land on top, it induces anxiety, a debilitating perfectionism, and a meritocratic hubris that struggles to conceal a fragile self-esteem. Among those it leaves behind, it imposes a demoralizing, even humiliating sense of failure.”

The winners gloat and their hubris grows. The losers sulk and their resentment festers. The result is an embittered society that forgets sources of value other than winning. Sandel suggest this causes us to forget the common good. It also ignores the need for compassion and forgiveness.

Pathological perfectionism grows out of a winner-takes-all environment. But no one can win at everything all the time. That’s why we need to forgive our own faults and learn to be compassionate, even to ourselves.

Tyrannical ambition

This pathology also shows up in politics. Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, explained the pathological perfectionism of the Trump family. In the Trump family, she said, “Life is a zero-sum game. There’s one winner. Everybody else is a loser. If you’re not winning, you’re losing.”

This helps explain the former President’s tendency toward hyperbolic exaggeration, including allegedly fraudulent asset valuations. Trump wanted to be the GOAT. His MAGA slogan was all about “greatness.”

It was not surprising, then, that he lied about his crowd sizes. Trump also apparently lies about his golf scores. Those banal lies and his insatiable appetite for winning eventually gave way to the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election, which continues to destabilize our country.

The dream of perfection is part of the pathology of would-be tyrants. They want to be gods and to have god-like power, as I explain in my book Tyranny from Plato to Trump. Tyrannical ambition is the strange desire to win the game of life. A would-be tyrant wants, in Plato’s words, to “fill the whole world with his name and power.”

Of course, this is absurd. We are mortals, not gods. But hubris and perfectionism make us dream of being gods and GOATs.

Perfectionism in politics can lead us to think that our political opponents are evil foes who must be defeated at any cost. And it can cause would-be tyrants to lie, cheat, and worse, in pursuit of the dream of perfect power.

To prevent tyrannical perfectionism from taking root in political life, we need a system that guarantees that no single party or individual is able to establish itself permanently in power. This is the virtue of a system of checks and balances. A secular political structure prevents anyone from imposing their vision of perfection onto the rest of us.

Grumpy moral saints

And what about moral perfectionism? Well, we are all flawed. And those who claim to be saints are more often than not a pain to be around. A kind of perfectionism also helps to explain the pearl-clutching outrage that we find on social media.

Perfectionism makes us grumpy. We are quick to judge the failures of others. We set the bar quite high. And when people fail to jump over it, we pile on with scorn and contempt. Often this is perfectionist resentment projected outward. “I’m not perfect,” the critic says. “But at least I’m not as lame as you are.”

But no one is perfect. Our heroes and saints have their faults. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison owned slaves. Gandhi has been accused of racism. FDR, JFK, and MLK each had extramarital affairs. Our heroes all have the same feet of clay we do.

We arguably need heroes anyway, and there is a value in moral striving. It is good to aspire to be better. But perfectionism can lead us to think in a toxic moral binary: if you are not perfect, you are evil. And the impossibility of perfection leaves us all in a hell of our own devising.

Perfectionism creates guilt and anxiety when turned inward. When projected outward, it becomes censorious and mean.

Secular compassion and forgiveness

In the Christian world, much of this is connected to the problem of sin. Christianity offers a remedy in forgiveness and atonement. But some religious people seem to forget that forgiving is part of the story. Religious scolds are quick to judge but slow to forgive.

Nonreligious people can, ironically, fall into the same holier-than-thou trap. Secular perfectionism may grow from the realization that this is the only life we’ve got. In struggling to make the most of this life, we may believe that the goal is to win.

If there is no God to forgive us, we must learn to forgive ourselves.

That is a strange view of life. Life is not a zero-sum game. There are no winners. Rather, we struggle onward and do our best. And soon enough, every GOAT passes on.

The remedy is compassion and forgiveness. This is as true for secular scolds as for religious fault-finders. Some humanists seem especially eager to attack the failures of religious hypocrites. But we’d do better to tread lightly and stop judging.

Indeed, in a world without sin and metaphysical atonement, the need is obvious for compassion doled out between humans. We’ve got to take care of one another. If there is no God to forgive us, we must learn to forgive ourselves.

We should do our best to live as well as we can in an imperfect world. There are no saints, and no one is the GOAT. Nor should we expect anyone to be, not even the person in the mirror.

The post Against perfectionism appeared first on OnlySky Media.

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We’re often taught that love is the solution to hate. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” There is some wisdom here. But King’s vision of brotherly love is quite demanding. And love can be a dangerous emotion.

Love can cause us to do unreasonable things. Indeed, racism, ethnocentrism, and hate are often connected to a perverse and pernicious form of love.

So, instead of focusing on love as an antidote to hate, we might also consider disciplining our emotions and learning to leave each other alone.

As hate crimes continue to haunt the headlines, our culture is plagued by violent emotions that are encouraged by social media and advertising. There is too much anger and too many guns. We would all benefit from an effort to encourage emotional maturity and keep passion under control.

Modern hate crimes in historical contexts

The shooting in Buffalo and other recent hate crimes repeat a pattern that is too familiar. Racism is not a modern invention; nor is mass murder. Modern technologies abet evil and amplify atrocity. But the cause is found deep in the human heart.

The first word of Homer’s Iliad is “wrath” or “rage.” Achilles is a broken-hearted lover. When his best friend is killed, he goes on a murderous rampage.

The ancient Greeks suggested that the problem is passion itself. Hate and love are both too vehement. They can each cause us to do unwise things. And while love appears to be on the side of the angels, it can easily become its opposite.

The ancient Stoics proposed a useful solution: cultivate indifference. Passion needs discipline. Once the passions are subdued, it is easier to leave other people alone. Racists and murderers are obsessed with those they hate. It is too much to ask that they should learn to love their neighbors. But perhaps we can all learn to be less obsessed with other people.

Cultivating indifference does not mean that we’re indifferent to hate. Hate crimes are wrong. And it is right to condemn them. We should analyze the cesspool of white supremacy and other hate groups. And we should work to control easy access to deadly weapons.

But we also need a general reassessment of the role of powerful emotions in our spiritual lives. Hate disrupts rationality. This is why haters are not deterred by threat of punishment. Instead, like Achilles, they are consumed by passion, which propels them toward atrocity.

Hate as a spiritual problem

Hate has many causes and occasions. We could blame inequality and insecurity, or the dog whistles of certain parties and politicians. We may also want to look into the psyches of those who commit hate crimes. Perhaps something went wrong in the hater’s upbringing. We might look to blame parents, peers, or teachers. Biographical and psychological details are important as we diagnose specific causes.

But if we probe even deeper, we see a perennial spiritual malfunction. Achilles is not the only example of passion run amok. Among the haters of ancient literature is Medea, who murdered her own children out of hatred for her husband. In Robinson Jeffers rendering of the story, Medea says, “Loathing is endless. Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour.”

Hatred has an ugly tendency to fester and grow. The bottomless cup of cruelty has a long and sordid history. It extends from the atrocities of the ancient world through the genocides and holocausts of modernity.

The obsession of hate

Willard Gaylin describes hatred in his book on the topic as “a sustained emotion of rage that occupies an individual through much of his life, allowing him to feel delight in observing or inflicting suffering on the hated one.” He continues, “It is always obsessive and almost always irrational.”

Gaylin points out that most of us have never really experienced the depth of emotion that leads the hater to commit hate crimes. That’s good news! We mostly control ourselves and rarely succumb to rage and irrational obsession. But notice that this shows that it is not love that cures hate but, rather, self-control and emotional maturity.

At one point, the recipe for moral and emotional education included a healthy dose of religion. But as our world becomes more secular, we need other sources of spiritual insight and guidance. Literature and philosophy can help.

As our world becomes more secular, we need other sources of spiritual insight and guidance.

Aristotle suggested that a lack of moderation and an imbalance in the emotions was the problem. Importantly, Aristotle did not condemn hate. Rather, he encouraged people to learn to hate the right things, in the right way, and to the right extent. The ancient Stoics were more critical of the overwhelming power of strong emotions. They encouraged people to subdue their emotions.

The emotional dog of extremism

Modern thinkers provide further insight on hate and the emotions. David Hume famously said that reason is the slave of the passions. This suggests that our judgments are rationalizations that come after the fact. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, the emotional dog wags the rational tail.

The point is that we won’t be able to change people’s minds until we help them subdue their passions.

Hate and love are tightly intertwined, each a form of passion. And while it is wise to prefer love over hate, love is also problematic. It easily gives rise to envy, jealousy, resentment, and, yes, even hate.

There are perverse and pernicious kinds of love. One recent analysis of extremism explains that radicalization is driven by a mix of emotions including pride, anger, and fear. Love is also in the mix.

Racism is not only a movement of hate; it is also a kind of love. The racist loves members of his own race. The hate-love matrix explains jingoistic patriotism, ethnocentrism, cultural imperialism, and religious zealotry.

The limits of love

Advocates of the Golden Rule and brotherly love encourage us to develop a more universal love. This is a wonderful project. In the ideal world, love would grow and expand. And in its universality, there would be no room for hate.

But the ideal of brotherly love is for saints and mahatmas. In ordinary experience, love is focused and concrete. Love is oriented toward real objects, uniting us with something limited and specific. But in this way, it also opposes us to something else.

Now ideally, the positive affirmation of love should be satisfying and complete. But when the object of love is attacked, we respond and react with anger, fear, and hate. The patriot is outraged by attacks on his country. The mother is enraged by attacks on her children. And the supremacist is furious about attacks on his people.

These attacks need not be actual. It is enough to imagine that the object of our love is under assault for hatred to fester. One way to understand hate is to scratch its surface and see what the hater loves.

The challenge of nihilism

Some forms of hate appear to be divorced from any concrete form of love. There are nihilists who hate everything. But nihilistic hate may also be understood as a malfunction of love.

One type of nihilism emerges from disappointment in a world that fails to love us. Imagine a child who thinks the universe (or God or society) ought to love him. When his ego crashes into the reality of an indifferent world, self-love is warped into hatred. Camus explained the hatred and violence of Nazi Germany in his book “The Rebel,” as follows: “To those who despair of everything, not reason but only passion can provide a faith, and in this particular case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair—namely, humiliation and hatred.”

This kind of despairing self-love may explain the rage and resentment of those who think that society is betraying them. It may also explain the hatred of so-called “incels,” those who are involuntarily celibate. These folks believe that people should want to have sex with them. But when they find themselves alone and unloved, their desire for love is warped into hate. And in a growing number of cases, their rage becomes violent.

Instead of love: The wisdom of Stoic indifference

Martin Luther King’s idea of love driving out hate is a Christian solution. He implies that the hater’s heart can be changed through an infusion of love. This makes some sense. But another part of the solution is to discipline the heart. The problem with hate (and of love) is connected to the vehemence with which the heart is pounding. The danger is passion without restraint. The solution is to get passion under control.

The danger is passion without restraint. The solution is to get passion under control.

The Stoic sage Marcus Aurelius said, “The mind that is free from passion is a citadel.” Marcus thought it was a sign of weakness to be overcome by anger, hatred, and love. The best life would be one in which we were unharmed by pains, untouched by insults, and indifferent to passion.

It is difficult to live dispassionately, and there are few full-fledged sages. But we benefit from studying the wisdom of Stoicism. This concept is best taught early, perhaps in school. The ideal is a person with a disciplined heart, who stops obsessing about other people. Such an attitude could be helpful in a world focused with the likes, followers, and trolls of social media.

Learning to leave others alone

The haters of this world seem to think that they are manifesting strength in acting on their hate. They are encouraged in this belief by a culture that celebrates passion as a sign of authenticity.

Stoicism imagines something different. It teaches us to be indifferent to what others think of us. It suggests that in giving in to passion, we exhibit weakness and behave in ways that are shameful. The haters are deeply affected by those they hate, but it would be better for them to see this as a weakness that needs to be overcome.

It is too much to demand that haters learn to love their enemies, as Jesus once put it. Perhaps that kind of spiritual transformation works for saints and mahatmas. But it can also lead us back to despair and hatred, when we realize that our enemies will not respond in kind. And so long as we are either loving them or hating them, our enemies remain a focal point of obsession. A more realistic solution is indifference and learning to ignore those things that previously generated hated.

Overcoming hate involves disciplining our emotions and learning to grow a thicker skin. We should realize that other people are not properly our concern. And we should understand that hatred is a weakness. There is strength in the inner citadel. And there is wisdom in learning to leave other people alone.

The post How to fight hate? We need to cultivate indifference. appeared first on OnlySky Media.

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Walking is good for the environment. It is also good for the body and the soul. 

A recent study suggests that walking may slow the aging process. But walking is not merely a tool for longevity. It is also an instrument of spiritual health. An MIT study found that walking increased markedly during the COVID-19 pandemic, often in response to the negative emotional effects of lockdowns and isolation.

So why should we walk? Because walking is good for the earth and for the human spirit.

Sauntering with John Muir and Henry David Thoreau

It is worth considering the art of walking on Earth Day, which also coincides with John Muir’s birthday. John Muir is well known as a conservationist. He was also a maniacal walker. In 1867, he walked 1,000 miles, from Indianapolis to Florida. In his account of that walk, Muir wrote:

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.

John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

To “walk with nature” is a metaphor, of course. It means to live in communion with nature. The phrase was employed by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. And it echoes the ancient Stoics, who taught us to live in accord with nature.

But the metaphor is grounded in the invigorating movement of the body in the world. The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “It does good also to take walks out of doors, that our spirits may be raised and refreshed by the open air and fresh breeze.”

Henry David Thoreau published a famous essay, “Walking,” in 1862. Thoreau said that he spends hours each day “sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

Thoreau reminds us that freedom is a key to the art of walking. When Muir calls for us to “let children walk with nature,” he is encouraging us to allow our children the freedom to roam, to explore, and to discover the “divine harmony.”

Absorbing the world while walking

This is not as far out as it sounds. Walking creates a sense of interconnection. The pace of a walk is exactly right for finding yourself at home in your environment. We miss something when we zoom about, whether online or in cars. We are hard-wired by evolution to absorb the world at a walking pace.

In a car, the scenery passes by in a blur. But when we walk, we see individuals. When walking past other people, whether we say hello or avert our eyes, the stranger is present to us. In a car, we do not even notice the strangers we pass. Nor do we see the trees, flowers, birds, and animals. Walking opens the mind and connects us to the world.

This is understood by the world’s spiritual traditions. When I studied Zen, we did walking meditation. The rhythm of walking frees the mind. In other traditions, pilgrimages are filled with spiritual significance. And in some traditions, a vision quest includes a walkabout.

Walking for all

Not everyone has the leisure to walk. The Sierra Club began as a club for affluent white people with the leisure to hike and climb. John Muir was a man of his time who harbored racist ideas. And native peoples lived in the “wild nature” celebrated by Muir and Thoreau. 

The MIT study mentioned above found that the increase in walking during the pandemic was anything but evenly distributed by class, income, and race: Those with more income and leisure time were much more likely to engage in the practice.

Poets, philosophers, and explorers often forget their position of privilege. We must do better. We need a more universal approach to the joy of walking.

The freedom and joy of walking should be enjoyed by children of all races and classes. Poor children and children of color need to be introduced to the wonders of nature. And all children deserve to have safe neighborhoods and parks, where they can wander, play, and explore. 

There is something transformative about a multi-day backpacking trip through the backcountry.  It would be great if more people had access to that kind of experience. But it should be possible for all people to walk safely through their own neighborhoods. Let’s make sure that everyone has good places to walk.

Making the mountains glad again

When Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892, his goal was to preserve wild places. He said he hoped this would “make the mountains glad.”

These days, the mountains are not glad. The forests around Muir’s beloved Yosemite are dying. The ancient Sequoia groves have been devastated by drought and fire. We’ve got a lot of conservation work to do.

There is also spiritual work to be done. We zoom about, removed from nature, and from each other. We need to rediscover the pace of nature and find ways to walk with nature. To make the mountains glad again and to heal our own spirits, we must rediscover the joy of walking.

The post The joy of walking appeared first on OnlySky Media.

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Americans are skeptical of religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccination rules. According to a recent Pew survey, two-thirds of Americans suspect that those who claim a religious exemption are “just using religion as an excuse to avoid the vaccine.” But let’s be cautious in judging other people.  It is difficult to judge the sincerity of our own beliefs. It is even harder to evaluate the sincerity of another person’s beliefs. That’s why we need toleration. There is wisdom in leaving other people alone, even when they are hypocritical and confused.

Atheists in foxholes?

Human beings are shape-shifters and opportunists. We adapt to environments. We respond to changing circumstances.  Sometimes, we make mistakes. Hopefully, we learn from them.  Stoic firmness is a rare achievement. 

Some philosophers go so far as to claim that character and integrity are mythological.  Situationism is the idea that character depends upon circumstances.  Education and culture shape our beliefs and our behaviors.  When in Rome, we tend to behave as the Romans do.

A related idea says that there are no atheists in foxholes. Phil Zuckerman has shown that this old adage is false. Some soldiers become atheists precisely because of the stupidity and cruelty of war. Situationism teaches that we can’t predict what we will believe until we are actually thrown into a foxhole. Some will turn to God. Some will turn away. And some will remain confused.

Our beliefs evolve in response to new knowledge and changing circumstances.  But mostly we fumble about.  And sometimes we change our minds.

The strangeness of belief

Beliefs are strange things.  They exist somewhere in the subconscious mind.  They don’t become manifest until they are put to the test or somehow called forth.  Until we are in a foxhole—or asked to wear a mask or get a vaccine—we don’t know what we might believe. 

If it is difficult to understand and predict our own beliefs, it is even more difficult to judge the beliefs of others.  It is not impossible to figure out when people are lying or deceiving themselves.  But it is more difficult than we might think. 

One difficulty is that declarations of belief are self-reinforcing.  When you declare you believe something, you tend to double down on that belief.  That’s one of the reasons that clubs, churches, and courtrooms ask people to publicly swear oaths and affirm creeds.  Once you state something publicly, you are more likely to believe it. 

There are liars and hypocrites.  But most people say what they believe and believe what they say.  And social systems reinforce creeds, oaths, and beliefs.  Our beliefs do not exist in isolation within our heads.  Rather, they are supported and encouraged by social institutions.

Some critics of secularism appeal to this idea.  They worry, for example, that when prayer and the Bible are taken out public life, people will abandon religion.  This worry is, in fact, a kind of situationism.  It suggests that religious belief is the result of social pressure and supporting institutions.  The religious critic might be right that when religion is removed from the public sphere, religious belief will fade.  The growth of non-religion in recent decades could be used as evidence to support a situationist theory of belief.

Toleration and inward sincerity

Of course, the Founding Fathers did not intend to undermine religion when they drafted the First Amendment.  They wanted to allow diverse Christian people to peacefully co-exist.  The Founders also tended to follow John Locke in thinking that religious belief required “inward sincerity” that was not susceptible to institutional pressure.  As Locke put it, “men cannot be forced to be saved,” rather, “they must be left to their own consciences.”

But freedom of conscience makes faith more difficult. Belief is easier when social institutions reinforce orthodoxy. In a secular system, it is up to us to figure out what we believe. This is challenging but worth the effort. Freely chosen beliefs tend to be stronger than beliefs that result from conformity and peer pressure. 

Tolerating the hypocrites

And now, let’s return to religious vaccine exemptions.  Some people may be lying when asking for a religious exemption.  But secular toleration encourages us to give people substantial lee-way when it comes to expressions of faith. 

Religious liberty allows us to figure out what we believe and why.  It also allows us to make mistakes and change our minds.  So long as the harm of an exemption is not too large, we should tolerate nonconformity.  We might even tolerate a few liars and cheats.  In the end, we all benefit from a secular system that allows us the freedom to figure out what we actually believe. We benefit from strong protections of religious liberty, even though some hypocrites may abuse their freedom and lie about the sincerity of their faith.

The post Tolerating the hypocrites: religious exemptions and the problem of belief appeared first on OnlySky Media.

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A friend recently suggested that apathy is a reasonable response to a world gone mad.  He called this the “apathy of impotence.” The apathy of impotence grows from the feeling that there is nothing we can do to change a world afflicted by systematic and structural problems. Rather than beating your head against the wall, it is tempting to just stop caring. I fear that the apathy of impotence is one reason young people are succumbing to depression and suicide. 

I feel hopeless myself at times in the face of so many overwhelming social, political, and environmental crises. How do we create hope in a world that seems hopeless?

The climate example

At the risk of adding to the mountain of despair, consider an example. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an ominous recent report. We are probably going to witness temperature changes that go beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, without any real plan in place to prevent this. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, warned in response, “we are on a fast track to climate disaster.”

We’ve all witnessed the storms, the fires, the shifting seasons. It seems there is not much any individual can do about it. The world is constructed in a way that requires us to consume fossil fuels. Corporate interests and governmental policies are maintaining a disastrous status quo.

Yes, committed individuals can bike more, drive less, and eat vegetarian diets. But the impact of these individual choices are drops in the ocean. The real solution requires a change in the infrastructure, the economy, and the political system. Individuals feel powerless in the face of this challenge. So we lose hope and become apathetic.

Nero’s fiddle and the vortex of despair

As my friend suggested, apathy is not a moral failing but a reasonable response. If there is nothing you can do to make change, you might as well stop worrying. I once described this as the problem of “Nero’s Fiddle”: If Rome is burning and there is no chance you can stop it, you might as well pick up your fiddle and play, right?

This is dangerous. Apathy and despair create a vicious cycle. Instead of working to fix the problem, we give up—and the problem grows worse. The worse it gets, the more likely we are to give up. And so on. 

The vortex of despair is at the root of a number of problems that are best described as spiritual. Loneliness, sadness, and grief are often magnified by a vicious cycle. The lonely person mopes in her room, feeling left out. She convinces herself that she has no friends. She retreats to solitude and finds her worst fears confirmed.

Health problems are also exacerbated in this way. You know you should eat better and exercise. But that is difficult. So, you put it off and eat junk food on the couch. The next day you feel sluggish, which leads you to retreat to the couch again.  

Hope as an active and social virtue

How do we break out of that vicious cycle? One solution is religious. At Easter time, Christianity offers a story of hope. But secular and nonreligious folks must look elsewhere for a solution. One key is to understand hope as an active and social virtue. 

Hope is not something we passively receive but something we actively create. Hope grows from engagement. It blossoms when you work to generate it. Hope is also a social product. We become more hopeful when we are supported by others.

Hope without action is ephemeral. Passive hope is a mere dream that things will get better. But without action, things don’t get better. And thus, hopeful dreamers slip back into despair, when their passive dreams do not come true.

A more practical kind of hope grows from the realization that progress is only made by painstaking collective action. The philosopher Hannah Arendt directed our attention to this idea, with her concept of “natality.” This is the power of labor, birth, and creativity. Hope requires effort. Children are not born without labor and suffering. To create a better future, we must labor.

The apathy of impotence can be overcome by finding communities of engaged action. The vortex of despair is overcome by going out and getting to work. We find hope when we join together with others who are actively working to make change. 

Go to a public rally or protest. Participate in a political campaign. Register people to vote. In those social actions you will find like-minded people to support you and give you hope. You will also be actively participating in the labor of making change. 

The apathy of impotence can be overcome by hopeful social action. But this is not a panacea. There is no miraculous solution for big social and political problems. Rather, hopeful social action requires effort, engagement, and even some suffering. But it rests on the realization that things won’t improve unless we join together and get to work.

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