Essay 20: More Than Hand Wringing

While eating breakfast this morning I made the error of checking the news online. My custom is to first look at the Wall Street Journal. I find that publication to be less dramatic, less the-sky-is-falling than the others I read. As I scanned the articles, I could instantly sense my mood drop. Even in the Journal, I could find little to cheer about.

I am not alone in this sentiment. Our politics are excruciating. Covid changed just about everything. Our sense of personal security is threatened by rising crime and random mass shootings. Inflation, which had been emulating Rip Van Winkle for decades, is beginning to wound many families. Ukrainians, who should be enjoying the summer, are instead unimaginably suffering. It’s hard not to share at least some of their pain. As a nation, we remain painfully divided. Pessimists have reason to strut.

During a high school reunion a few years ago, I rekindled a friendship with someone with whom I had spent a great deal of time when we were in our early teens. For some reason neither of us can recall, we drifted apart and didn’t reconnect until that evening in a small New York hotel ballroom among the rest of our classmates. We promised to keep in touch by phone and Zoom, and we have. During our conversations, we discovered that we share a great fondness for the works of author Kurt Vonnegut whom both of us read extensively in college. So was born our two-man book club.

If you are unfamiliar with Kurt Vonnegut and have time for only one of his books, read Slaughterhouse Five. That nicely sums up Mr. Vonnegut’s contempt for humanity. Let’s just say he didn’t think much of us as a species, at least some of that colored by his experience at the bombing and destruction of Dresden near the end of World War II. If I had been so privileged to have had a conversation with him before he left us in 2007, here is what I believe I would have heard. Mankind is impressively ignorant and often equally impressively cruel, he would have told me without a crumb of uncertainty. Humans care little about the earth that holds their feet to the ground and even less about how their activities often harm it. They tend to make a mess of just about everything, he would have concluded. At least Mr. Vonnegut depresses in an amusing manner. Don’t let me scare you away. He is worth reading.

This is how I would have responded to Mr. Vonnegut. Our mistake, I would have suggested to him, is that we too often take the street view and too infrequently the aerial view. The street view frightens. There is hunger and filth, violence, treachery, and dishonesty. That is all real, but it is not all that is real. Were we to metaphorically take to the skies for a different view, the scene we would experience would be far different. From the air, we can appreciate the whole instead of isolated parts. All of the green is stitched together and embraces the dirt and concrete. The street is noisy, the constant din unsettling. Above it is near silent save for the calming white noise of the wind. While immersed in the street view, it is easy for one to be overwhelmed by anger, resentment, sadness, and fear. When we allow ourselves to rise above and take in the grander scale of things, serenity graciously replaces angst. We begin to get it. We begin to see the foolishness in much of what we do.

In one of his books, The Sirens of Titan, Mr. Vonnegut weaves a marvelous tale of purpose, not just man’s but that of the entire universe. I won’t spoil the story, but let’s just say he makes the whole thing as hilariously absurd as possible. During our imaginary conversation, I would have pressed him on this idea of purpose. Though relentlessly cynical, I believe he would have admitted that he preferred my conclusion, that we are here for a reason, one that is anything but absurd. One that makes all the sense in the world. Every pessimist secretly yearns to find a reason to switch sides and join the optimists.

When I find myself sinking, as I did while reading this morning’s news, I remind myself of what I have learned, what I have shared during these essays and would have shared with Mr. Vonnegut. Our world is not what we think. Life is not what we think. During the first ten essays, we discussed how and why that is. Spend a moment and take another look at Essay 9: Death. It reminds us that longevity is not the purpose of life. Follow that with Essay 10: Our Common Purpose. Together they make the case that life is preparation.

Today’s world appears to be a mess, but it has always looked like a mess. In many ways, it is far better than it has ever been. Despite the magnitude of our problems, we can succeed. A society linked arm in arm can handle most anything. The real crisis remains our division, our contentiousness. There is little peace among the populace.

We can clean up the mess, but to do so requires us to cease the animosity and repair the division. Our common purpose, to evolve from selfish to selfless, from inward to outward-focused, offers a path to do just that. That is why I have written these twenty essays and will write essay twenty-one next week, and those that will follow. They are my small effort to illuminate a way forward.

As recent events have reminded us, the world can change at any moment. We can change at any moment. No matter how impossible a task appears to be, in a quantum world, the probability of success is never zero. Time to stop wringing our hands and get to work.