Pseudo-Success And The Undoing Of America
Dear M and C,
We live in frenzied, hyper-productive times and the possibility of being "swept away" is real.
Cultural "traps" on all sides and in unexpected places.
Facing the allegation that he had not denounced Hitler early enough, Carl Jung said (and I paraphrase): 'The zeitgeist - the spirit of the times - carries such suasive force that it draws everyone's personal center in the direction its own. No matter how perverse the spirit of the times, at bedrock almost no one escapes its tidal pull.'
Facing the allegation that he had not denounced Hitler early enough, Carl Jung said (and I paraphrase): 'The zeitgeist - the spirit of the times - carries such suasive force that it draws everyone's personal center in the direction its own. No matter how perverse the spirit of the times, at bedrock almost no one escapes its tidal pull.'
Consider the following comments by two of my favorite thinkers, Trappist monk, Fr. Thomas Merton and G.K. Chesterton.
"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."
Thomas Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander," 1964
More Merton Quotes
"The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves." G. K. Chesterton, Toronto, 1930
G.K. Chesterton Quotations... And More
http://paxonbothhouses.
G.K. Chesterton Quotations... And More
http://paxonbothhouses.
Pax On Both Houses: Compendium Of G.K. Chesterton Posts
Here is the link that prompted me to write you today - a largely autobiographical vignette full of insight and subtlety.
How To Save Your Soul: Willa Cather On Productivity vs. Creativity And Selling Out
Midge Decter, a critic of "first wave" feminism, offers the following cautionary note whose paradoxical framework I find especially appealing:
'You are not responsible' sang the sirens of Liberation. 'Whatever you do that does not bring you joy --- from living in the suburbs and having babies to hanging out in bars and being promiscuous to spending your days in a job that bores you --- is not your fault. They -- men, society, your mothers, your fathers -- made you do it.' What can be more tempting than the notion that no decision taken in your life for which you may harbor some regret was a decision actually taken by you for yourself? And thus the whining began, cast, to be sure, in the language of social justice, and revolutionary determination, but whining all the same. So it went -- and went with flying success -- in those early years. Now it's three decades later. Young women are being as mercilessly exploited as young men in the white-shoe law firms, girl marines slog through the mud at Parris Island, and females train for the attempt to land airplanes on aircraft carriers.... Successful careers turn out to be a source not of liberation but of unending worry and demand.
From "Liberating Germaine Greer," a review by Midge Decter "First Things," 10/99
Just yesterday I wrote that "meaning depends on perception and definition" and here are a few useful definitions of success (one by fore-mentioned monk Merton):
"The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease." William James (from the renowned James family of Boston) remains one of America's most insightful thinkers. His book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, was (and is) a milestone in comparative religion. Here is James' Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James
Thomas Merton was once asked to write a chapter for a book entitled "Secrets of Success." He replied: "If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success." (Alan: Merton is talking here of the kind of "success" that is intrinsically unsatisfying. It should also be noted that his reference to "madmen, drunks and bastards of every shape and form" is rhetorical flourish and not literal recommendation.)
In the introductory essay to my first webpage, "Apokatastasis" (a forerunner of my "Pax" blog) I wrote:
"Without mindfulness, the tyranny of the "Disjointed Moment" binds us to the daemons of fashion, fatuity and dispirited physicality. Burdened by the claustrophobic crush of materialist immediacy, we accumulate tokens of "success," slowly coming to believe (whether consciously or not) that "s/he who dies with the most toys wins."
Bob Dylan On Money And Success
Aquinas observed that sin is always accompanied by loss of perspective/proportion.
William James
Wikipedia
William James Quotations
William James
Wikiquotes
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