Joy is part of the fabric of existence, and to avoid it is to diminish, if not imperil, oneself. That is the great truth evil cannot imagine or understand.
I’m hardly the first to observe this, but social media and our current regular media environment is doing us harm. I read two pieces related to this idea this morning. Daniel Schultz (“Pastor Dan”) has a piece on “The Editorial Board” entitled, “Doom is a Virus: it saps the will when you need it most.” Teri Kanefield has a post on her blog entitled “the Outrage Machine Strikes Again” in reference to the Supreme Court’s recent decision on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which nominally disqualifies oathbreaking insurrectionists from federal office.
Kanefield notes how the media environment leading up to and following the Supreme Court decision does citizens a disservice. Pundits, particularly those ostensibly given a platform because of their legal expertise, who pretend certainty and then double down when they’re wrong might make for good, profitable TV; but they don’t inform the public. She focuses on Laurence Tribe and Michael Luttig as examples. When nine Justices determined that states lacked the authority to enforce the provision barring oathbreaking insurrectionists from office, Tribe and Luttig didn’t grapple with that unanimity. The courts were simply corrupt, broken, or lacked courage. I don’t love the opinion or necessarily think it was right – certainly not the dicta that went beyond concluding that states lacked the authority to enforce the provision against federal officials. But, I also don’t think, for example, that Justice Sotamayor is corrupt, ignorant of the law, or lacking in courage. Kanefield notes that the kind of noise generated by pundits like Tribe and Luttig dilute the information stream.
As a result of our current information disruption, people who inhabit certain media ecosystems are being sprayed with a firehose of speculations, conjecture, and hype. They get confused. They don’t know what the truth is. … Sometimes when people are continually confused, they conclude that the entire system is hopelessly broken and they give up on it. This is what Russian propaganda does deliberately. Guess what happens when enough people give up on democracy or decide the truth is unknowable?
For me, this leads into Pastor Dan’s piece. He talks about how feelings of Doom sap our will when we need it most.
In the fourth century AD, the early Christian monastic Evagrius Ponticus wrote about acedia, a state of restless futility. The “Noonday Demon,” as he called it, convinced his brother monks their day was “fifty hours long” and hard work not worth the toil.
He calls this DOOM (all caps), observes that it is more common among terminally online types, and says, “DOOM is experiencing a surge on the left these days. Joe Biden continues to struggle in (as-yet unpredictive) polls.” It is tempting, he says, “to throw up our hands, declare democracy already dead in the United States, and head out for fairer pastures.” Our media environment is a powerful vector of despair.
But, Pastor Dan encourages us, we have been here before. We live in a country “founded on high-minded ideals of liberty as well as low-life practices of oppression.” Struggling with acedia prepares us for the fight. Evagrius counseled that we should:
[D]ivide ourselves in two. “One part is to encourage; the other part is to be encouraged,” he says. “Thus we are to sow seeds of a firm hope in ourselves.” DOOM may be a virus, but so is its opposite. Hope is contagious, and it spreads through giving and receiving support.
I always go back to Bruce Cockburn who said, that you “got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.” And, frankly, to an old fantasy series I read as a kid, “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” which was, in large part, a meditation on despair and how to resist it. Here is one scholarly article where the work is discussed. I’ve mentioned the scene before around here, so clearly it had resonance for me:
[P]erhaps Schopenhauer is right: “Humor is the only divine quality in man.” In the third book of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, Lord Foul finally gets his poetic justice. Yet it comes not from a battle or contest of power but from a place of pure joy. Known throughout the books as “the Despiser,” the cynical destroyer and source of large-scale evil in the world, Lord Foul has chained up the giant Saltheart Foamfollower, who is at the brink of despair. Covenant tells him to laugh, to recall the power of laughter: “I want you to laugh. Take joy in it. Bring some joy into this bloody hole. Laugh!” (466). Laughter begins to well up in his soul, and the laughter purifies first himself: “as Foamfollower fought to laugh, his muscles loosened. The constriction of his throat and chest relaxed, allowing a pure wind of humor to blow the ashes of rage and pain from his lungs. Soon something like joy, something like real mirth, appeared in his voice” (467). After the laughter purifies himself, it begins to cleanse the world. It vanquishes Lord Foul, whose life in the face of the laughter unwinds like a clock and finally vanishes. As characters like Donaldson’s Covenant and Foamfollower look into the malevolent forces that drive evil, look deep into the gaping void that evil creates about itself, they come to understand that joy is part of the fabric of existence, and to avoid it is to diminish, if not imperil, oneself. That is the great truth evil cannot imagine or understand. Perhaps fantasy writers cannot do without the trope, after all. Perhaps Schopenhauer’s one glowing spark might be kindled again.
I firmly believe that we have to embrace joy. There is no other way.
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