The Sickness Unto Death

Wretchard posts a provocative essay on The Long War, what Newt Gingrich describes as "an inherently offensive war in which we have to actively defeat our opponents. Furthermore this war resembles the Reformation-era wars of religion in which fellow nationals may be traitors serving the other side (examine Elizabethan England and the origins of the English secret service as an example)."

I think there is something deeper--something more primal--that we are fighting for, and fighting against. Our enemy is more than the "irreconcilable wing of Islam", though it is that, too. It is more than terrorism--which is nothing but a particular manifestation of our enemy--and it is more than nihilism, though nihilism is a direct consequence and a dangerous ideological iteration of our underlying foe.

In the year 2005 of the common era, we find ourselves in a state of flux. We are witnessing a shift in the human condition, one that is global and fraught with...unknowns. That there are so many unknowns gives rise to caution, perhaps even fear and trembling, for in our depths we know that chaos, chance, dynamism--these things bring storms as often as they bring light.

We are in the twilight of an era. Many of us, if we are observant, can see the sun setting on a vast array of ideas and a previously-powerful set of ideologies. Memes that are as old as man and thoughts only recently born are giving way to a new order, one not yet consumated but brimming with its own potential energy. Some ideas will carry over, and some will perish in the night. That we know not which is cause for some concern.

Peggy Noonan senses the twilight in her recent essay:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon...

I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding--the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them...

I have wondered if it hasn't all gotten too big, too complicated, too crucial, too many-fronted, too . . . impossible...

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

Cicero, at Winds of Change, also senses a shift:

And there we have the Old Order, nursing their drinks and watching the sunset. "Who knows about the coming sunrise," they lament, looking confused. And so it is confusing -- none of us see the sunrise to come. We only see the sunset. We remember the warmth of the long day. We knit together pleasant memories and the certainty of past convictions, admiring the clarity we once had.

I think both 'sides' within the West -- left and right, European and American -- really are after the same thing: to preserve what they have.

Cicero speaks of this shift as a law of nature, and our reaction to it a law of man:

I think that's where Ms. Noonan's at. She's from a generation that saw great things in itself, and in its nation. What comes next is beyond comprehension. We're in flux -- change only seems to bring about more change, over and over again. Older people want to hang on to what they have, perhaps more so than keep up with the times. I empathize -- I know that none of us on the cutting edge should be so smug as to think we're past getting cut by it ourselves. Compounding innovation exacts a heavy toll, and can leave many people behind. None of us can say what the outcome will be.

Ms. Noonan is witnessing and lamenting the passage of an era -- one that needs to pass by. It's hard, because we are a part of that era. Looking to a waning era's elite for consolation is understandable, but it will not ease the bewilderment. New worlds are being built, while old ones fall. Somehow, we have to be brave, put away the photo albums, and engage this flux.

Cicero speaks of the way forward, but his analysis also implies a destination of sorts. A physical destination it is not, nor is it stationary, but it is a place we must get to nonetheless. Our lives--our survival--depend on it.

The goal--the destination--is elusive, and it cannot be held down nor spoken of in precise terms. As Marcus Aurelius said of Rome, it is but a whisper, an idea so fragile that to speak it causes it to vanish. It is drastically vulnerable to invasion and subversion. Enemies, it may be said, are all around.

What I speak of is a posture, an outlook and a direction to look out. I would call it truth, for it is that, but that is not enough. Bravery and courage are elements of it; goodness and virtue define it. Compassion, rigor, vitality, decency; patience, hope, temperance, and faith--how many coordinates must be given before the constellation begins to take shape?

The name of the constellation is elusive, but as Shakespeare said, by any name it smells as sweet. Like many things, it exists as relation. More specifically, it is a relation that relates to itself:

The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another.

That is a quote from Soren Kierkegaard, taken from his book "The Sickness Unto Death." Enigmatic? Maybe, but it is not impermeably so. One can approach it, weigh it, taste it even, and its truth, like a kernel, is there to find if one looks hard enough. It is the truth of who we are, who we can be, who we should be. The disconnect between those concepts is our danger--our bane of existence. It is the sickness that afflicts many, a nothingness that spreads everyday. It is despair:

Despair is the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself...

An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is "Either Caesar or nothing" does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently he does not despair because he did not get to be Caesar but despairs over himself because he did not get to be Caesar.... Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper.... To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.

Our enemy, the one we fight in this long war, is despair. Our problem, and perhaps our contradiction, is the freedom we are spreading, wittingly and unwittingly, across the entire world. Let me explain.

A man who cannot be Caesar, who has no hope of being Caesar, does not despair when he remains himself. A man who is born, lives, and dies with a knowledge of place, of status, of inevitability does not despair over unrequited dreams of conquest and glory, fame and fortune. A man who is chained, who understands the inevitability of those chains, looks upon his condition with resignation, perhaps with hatred, perhaps with indignation--he does not, however, regret...and he does not despair. It is not himself he wishes to be rid of. It is the world that abuses him so violently and unapologetically that he finds disgusting, and unworthy. He wills himself, as himself, a better life. But he does not despair; he does not will to be rid of himself.

Freedom is defined by Kierkegaard as "the dialectical aspect of the categories possibility and necessity." It is the relation of these two concepts that defines freedom--possibility and chance pulling one side while necessity and determination pull the other. The self, when thrown into this violent vortex, can be ripped apart by the competing currents, and that is where you can find despair.

Our problem--our test--is that we are building a world that is eminently likable, an existence of perfect malleability that at once seduces and taunts our passions, and our soul. We are building a world of freedom and prosperity unlike any that has ever been seen, yet we are blind to the implications and dangers that lie beneath the surface. When the world is perfect, the self suffers in comparison. When you can be Caesar, when the world opens that door, it is the self that is hated for not walking through. The self despairs, and wills away its existence.

In a world of freedom and opportunity, the self can no longer look outwards for definition, though it will try. It will try to subsume itself into a group, or an ideology, or a mass movement--these efforts will manifest themselves as spasms, and they will afflict our new world most grievously:

When feeling or knowing or willing has become fantastic, the entire self can become that, whether in the most active form of plunging headlong into fantasy or in the more passive form of being carried away.... The self, then, leads a fantasized existence in abstract infinitizing or in abstract isolation, continually lacking its self, from which it moves further and further away....To lack infinitude is despairing reductionism, narrowness.... But whereas one kind of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, another kind of despair seems to permit itself to be tricked out of its self by "the others." Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too hazardous to be himself, and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man.... When a self becomes lost in possibility...it is not merely because of a lack of energy.... What is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one's life, to what may be called one's limitations. Therefore, the tragedy is not that such a self did not amount to something in the world; no, the tragedy is that he did not become aware of himself, aware that the self he is a very definite something and thus the necessary.... The determinist, the fatalist, is in despair and as one in despair has lost his self, because for him everything has become necessary

The enemy, therefore, is within, but so is our salvation. I do not know how we can win, but win we must.

Our war is against despair. It is a melancholy joke that its forebearer is freedom.