A Time to Mourn?
Op-Ed Columnist: A Time to Mourn
January 1, 2005
By DAVID BROOKS
I have this week's front pages arrayed on the desk around
me. There's a picture of dead children lined up on a floor
while a mother wails. There's a picture of a man on the
beach holding his dead son's hand to his forehead. There
are others, each as wrenching as the last.
Human beings have always told stories to explain deluges
such as this. Most cultures have deep at their core a flood
myth in which the great bulk of humanity is destroyed and a
few are left to repopulate and repurify the human race. In
most of these stories, God is meting out retribution,
punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood
starts a new history, which will be on a higher plane than
the old.
Nowadays we find these kinds of explanations repugnant. It
is repugnant to imply that the people who suffer from
natural disasters somehow deserve their fate. And yet for
all the callousness of those tales, they did at least put
human beings at the center of history.
In those old flood myths, things happened because human
beings behaved in certain ways; their morality was tied to
their destiny. Stories of a wrathful God implied that at
least there was an active God, who had some plan for the
human race. At the end of the tribulations there would be
salvation.
If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past
week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of
this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the
universe's main concern. We're just gnats on the crust of
the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die, victims
of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves.
Most of the stories that were told and repeated this week
were melodramas. One person freakishly survives while
another perishes, and there is really no cause for one's
good fortune or the other's bad. A baby survives by sitting
on a mattress. Others are washed out to sea and then wash
back bloated and dead. There is no human agency in these
stories, just nature's awful lottery.
The nature we saw this week is different from the nature we
tell ourselves about in the natural history museum, at the
organic grocery store and on a weekend outing to the
national park. This week nature seems amoral and viciously
cruel. This week we're reminded that the word "wilderness"
derives from the word for willful and uncontrollable.
This catastrophic, genocidal nature is a long way from the
benign and rhythmic circle of life in "The Lion King." It's
a long way from the naturalist theology of Thoreau's
"Walden" or the writings of John Muir.
The naturalists hold up nature as the spiritual tonic to
our vulgar modern world. They urge us to break down the
barriers that alienate us from nature. Live simply and
imbibe nature's wisdom. "Probably if our lives were more
conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves
against her heats and colds, but find her our constant
nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds," Thoreau
wrote.
Nature doesn't seem much like a nurse or friend this week,
and when Thoreau goes on to celebrate the savage wildness
of nature, he sounds, this week, like a boy who has seen a
war movie and thinks he has experienced the glory of
combat.
In short, this week images of something dark and unmerciful
were thrust onto a culture that is by temperament upbeat
and romantic.
In the newspaper essays and television commentaries
reflecting upon it all, there would often be some awkward
passage as the author tried to conclude with some easy
uplift - a little bromide about how wonderfully we all
rallied together, and how we are all connected by our
common humanity in times of crisis.
The world's generosity has indeed been amazing, but
sometimes we use our compassion as a self-enveloping fog to
obscure our view of the abyss. Somehow it's wrong to turn
this event into a good-news story so we can all feel warm
this holiday season. It's wrong to turn it into a story
about us, who gave, rather than about them, whose lives
were ruined. It's certainly wrong to turn this into yet
another petty political spat, as many tried, disgustingly,
to do.
This is a moment to feel deeply bad, for the dead and for
those of us who have no explanation.
January 1, 2005
By DAVID BROOKS
I have this week's front pages arrayed on the desk around
me. There's a picture of dead children lined up on a floor
while a mother wails. There's a picture of a man on the
beach holding his dead son's hand to his forehead. There
are others, each as wrenching as the last.
Human beings have always told stories to explain deluges
such as this. Most cultures have deep at their core a flood
myth in which the great bulk of humanity is destroyed and a
few are left to repopulate and repurify the human race. In
most of these stories, God is meting out retribution,
punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood
starts a new history, which will be on a higher plane than
the old.
Nowadays we find these kinds of explanations repugnant. It
is repugnant to imply that the people who suffer from
natural disasters somehow deserve their fate. And yet for
all the callousness of those tales, they did at least put
human beings at the center of history.
In those old flood myths, things happened because human
beings behaved in certain ways; their morality was tied to
their destiny. Stories of a wrathful God implied that at
least there was an active God, who had some plan for the
human race. At the end of the tribulations there would be
salvation.
If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past
week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of
this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the
universe's main concern. We're just gnats on the crust of
the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die, victims
of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves.
Most of the stories that were told and repeated this week
were melodramas. One person freakishly survives while
another perishes, and there is really no cause for one's
good fortune or the other's bad. A baby survives by sitting
on a mattress. Others are washed out to sea and then wash
back bloated and dead. There is no human agency in these
stories, just nature's awful lottery.
The nature we saw this week is different from the nature we
tell ourselves about in the natural history museum, at the
organic grocery store and on a weekend outing to the
national park. This week nature seems amoral and viciously
cruel. This week we're reminded that the word "wilderness"
derives from the word for willful and uncontrollable.
This catastrophic, genocidal nature is a long way from the
benign and rhythmic circle of life in "The Lion King." It's
a long way from the naturalist theology of Thoreau's
"Walden" or the writings of John Muir.
The naturalists hold up nature as the spiritual tonic to
our vulgar modern world. They urge us to break down the
barriers that alienate us from nature. Live simply and
imbibe nature's wisdom. "Probably if our lives were more
conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves
against her heats and colds, but find her our constant
nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds," Thoreau
wrote.
Nature doesn't seem much like a nurse or friend this week,
and when Thoreau goes on to celebrate the savage wildness
of nature, he sounds, this week, like a boy who has seen a
war movie and thinks he has experienced the glory of
combat.
In short, this week images of something dark and unmerciful
were thrust onto a culture that is by temperament upbeat
and romantic.
In the newspaper essays and television commentaries
reflecting upon it all, there would often be some awkward
passage as the author tried to conclude with some easy
uplift - a little bromide about how wonderfully we all
rallied together, and how we are all connected by our
common humanity in times of crisis.
The world's generosity has indeed been amazing, but
sometimes we use our compassion as a self-enveloping fog to
obscure our view of the abyss. Somehow it's wrong to turn
this event into a good-news story so we can all feel warm
this holiday season. It's wrong to turn it into a story
about us, who gave, rather than about them, whose lives
were ruined. It's certainly wrong to turn this into yet
another petty political spat, as many tried, disgustingly,
to do.
This is a moment to feel deeply bad, for the dead and for
those of us who have no explanation.
posted by The Declinist at 2:27 AM
3 Comments:
Human beings have always told these stories? Thanks for being clear on that point, Brooks.
Pere Lundquist
Dear Mr. Pessimist
Cheer up man!
I mean Dave Brooks is just reflecting a general feeling of helplessness we are feeling, but you shouldn't let this get you down dude.
Brooks is usually more optimistic.
You probably feel Godforsken and you are using that feeling of yours, which is personal and which is connected to the Tsunami and you are "projecting" (sorry , big psych word!) that on to your negative worldview.
But that's just not right man.
Jesus tests us from time to time and now is such a time.
When you were in high school you did not take the SAT without preparing, so why are you approaching this test from the Lord without your own spiritual Princeton Review?
Yours in the Lord,
Morris Aiken, Ph.D
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