How to remain whole in tragic times
We’re living in a brutalizing time: Scenes of mass savagery pervade the media. Americans have become vicious toward one another amid our disagreements. People are coping with an avalanche of negative emotions: shock, pain, contempt, anger, anxiety, fear.
We in America are lucky. We’re not stuck in a cellar waiting for the next bomb to drop. We’re not currently the targets of terrorists who massacre families in their homes. We should still start every day with gratitude for the blessings we enjoy.
But we’re faced with a subtler set of challenges. How do you stay mentally healthy and spiritually whole in brutalizing times? How do you keep from becoming embittered, hateful, suspicious and desensitized?
Ancient wisdom has a formula to help us, which you might call skepticism of the head and audacity of the heart.
The ancient Greeks knew about violent times. They lived with frequent wars between city-states, with massacres and mass rape. In response, they adopted a tragic sensibility. This sensibility begins with the awareness that the crust of civilization is thin. Breakdowns into barbarism are the historic norm. Don’t fool yourself into believing that you’re living in an age too enlightened for hatred to take over.
In these circumstances, you can avoid thinking about the dark realities of life and naively wish that bad things won’t happen. Or you can confront these realities and develop a tragic mentality to help you thrive among them.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson would write centuries later, “Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”
And that goes for great women, too.
This tragic sensibility prepares you for the rigors of life in concrete ways.
First, it teaches humility. Greek tragedies sent the message that our accomplishments are tenuous. They remind us that it’s easy to become proud in moments of peace. We begin to exaggerate our ability to control our destinies. We begin to assume that the so-called justice of our cause guarantees success. Humility is not thinking lowly of yourself; it’s an accurate perception of yourself. It is the ability to cast aside illusions and see life as it is.
Second, the tragic sensibility nurtures a prudent approach to life. It encourages people to focus on the downsides of their actions and work to head them off. As Hal Brands and Charles Edel write in “The Lessons of Tragedy,” Greek tragedies were part of a culture that forced the Greeks to confront their own “frailty and fallibility.” By “shocking, unsettling and disturbing the audience, the tragedies also forced discussions of what was needed to circumvent such a fate.” In this way, people are taught resilience — to be prepared for the pain that will inevitably come.
Third, a tragic mentality encourages caution. As Thucydides would argue, in politics, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The price we pay for our errors is higher than the benefits we gain from our successes. So be careful of rushing into maximalist action, convinced of your own righteousness. Be incremental, patient and steady. This is advice I wish the Israelis
would heed as they wage war on Hamas. This is advice that Rep. Matt Gaetz and the burn-it-all-down caucus among the House Republicans will never understand.
Fourth, the tragic mentality teaches people to be suspicious of their own rage. “Rage” is in the first line of “The Iliad.” We see Agamemnon (whom we detest) and Achilles (whom we admire) behaving stupidly because they are angry. The lesson is that rage might feel luxurious because it convinces you of your own rightness, but ultimately, it blinds you and turns you into a hate-filled monster. This is advice I wish the hard left would heed, the people so consumed by their self-righteous fury that they become cruel — desensitized to the suffering of Israelis, because Israelis are the bad guys in their ideological fables.
Over time, rage corrodes the mind of its bearer. It hardens into the cold, amoral attitude we see in Donald Trump and in many others who inhabit what political sociologist Larry Diamond has called the “authoritarian zeitgeist.” This attitude says: The enemy is out to destroy us. The ends justify the means. Savagery is necessary.
Fifth, tragedies thrust the harsh realities of individual suffering in our faces, and in them we find our common humanity. I’ve always been amazed by Aeschylus’ play “The Persians.” It was performed after the battle that would eventually secure Athenian victory over the Persians, and it was written by a man who fought in that battle. Yet it is written from the Persian vantage point and elicits sympathy for the Persians, in all their hubris and suffering. It teaches us to be empathetic to all who suffer, not just those on our own side.
From this work, we learn to have contempt for sadism, for anything that dehumanizes, and to have compassion for the everyday people who pay the price for the designs of evil men. That compassion is the noble flame that keeps humanity alive
in times of war. That compassion recognizes the dignity of each soul.
I’ve been describing the prudent and humble mentality we learn from the Athenians. Now I turn to a different mentality, one that emerged among the Abrahamic faiths, and in their sacred city, Jerusalem. This mentality celebrates an audacious act: leading with love in harsh times.
Human beings need recognition. The essence of dehumanization is to not see someone, to render him invisible. For example, in the past few decades, we in the college-educated media and cultural circles have increasingly shut out working-class voices. Many people look at the national conversation and don’t see themselves represented there, and hence grow bitter and alienated. Members of the working class are far from the only people who feel invisible these days.
The core counterattack against this kind of dehumanization is to offer others the gift of being seen. What sunlight is to the vampire, recognition is to those who feel dehumanized. We fight back by casting a loving attention on others, by being curious about strangers, being vulnerable with them so they might be vulnerable, too. This kind of social repair can happen in our daily encounters.
I recently published a book on the concrete skills you need to do this, called “How to Know a Person.” During a Zoom call, someone asked: Isn’t it dangerous to be vulnerable toward others when there is so much betrayal and pain all around? My answer is: Yes, it is dangerous. But it is also dangerous to become calloused by hard times. It is also dangerous, as C.S. Lewis put it, to guard your heart so thoroughly that you make it “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
The great Black theologian Howard Thurman faced bigotry in his life, but as he put it in his 1949 book, “Jesus and
the Disinherited,” “Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father.”
One of my heroes is Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam in the 1930s and ’40s. Her early diaries reveal her to be immature and self-centered.
But as the Nazi occupation lasted and the horrors of the Holocaust mounted, she became more generous, kind and ultimately heroic toward those who were being sent off to death camps. She volunteered to work at a labor camp called Westerbork, where Dutch Jews were held before being transferred to death camps. There she cared for the ill, tended to those confined to the punishment barracks and became known for her compassion, her selfless love. Her biographer wrote that “it was her practice of paying deep attention which transformed her.” It was her ability to really see others — their anxieties, their cares and their attachments — that enabled her to enter into their lives and serve them.
In 1943, Hillesum herself was sent to Auschwitz and was murdered. But she left a legacy: What it looks like to shine and grow and be a beacon of humanity, even in the worst imaginable circumstances.
I’m trying to describe a dual sensibility — becoming a person who learns humility and prudence from the Athenian tradition, but also audacity, emotional openness and care from the Jerusalem tradition. Can a single person possess both traits? This was the question Max Weber asked in his essay “Politics as a Vocation”: “How can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul?”
It’s a hard challenge that most of us will fail at most of the time. But it’s the only effective way to proceed in times like these.