Jen Gerson: Cursing the sun in winter

Civilization is a reprieve that has fooled us about ourselves.

By: Jen Gerson

A fair warning right off the top: this is going to be a departure from my usual kind of column. I want to write about feelings. Not my forte, but bear with me. There’s a lot happening in the world at the moment, from the election of Donald Trump, and the implications of that for the wider world; to the ongoing wars in Israel and Ukraine; to everyday fears about getting the rent paid and the pantry stocked. We got riots in Montreal (again), and an increasing collective sense of being absolutely fed up with … all of it.

To acknowledge a recent observation made by our very serious Finance Minister, who attributed our collective economic malaise to a “vibecession,” the vibes are, indeed, bad.

I’m feeling bad, too.

I've been ruminating quite a lot since my return from Israel. Even though this experience offered only a very managed, very removed, very safe opportunity to see and feel just a sliver of what is happening there, it left me in a bit of a mood. It's one thing to shrug off the violence of individuals who may be insane or deranged or broken by circumstance. It's harder to face the ruins created by entire groups of people moved to collective depravity and cruelty.

It reminded me of that first season of True Detective, after the final confrontation, in which Marty and Rust share their thoughts while looking at a dark and starry sky. Marty says: "It appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”

So, yeah, I’ve been staring glumly into the darkness, fighting a pervasive sense that the game of life is rigged and pointless. If you’re anything like me, welcome, fellow child of darkness. I don’t think I have a cure, exactly, for the problem of being a human with feelings. But I do have an idea that might be useful to anyone who is struggling with what is happening in the world right now, or to anybody who may struggle with what's to come. 

Back to True Detective: Rust concedes Marty’s point, but also notes: "You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing. Once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.”

We’ll come back to that. But first, let me take you on a journey.

Almost a decade ago, I covered the kidnapping of a child in B.C. It was a spectacular story; the child was taken from his own bed in the middle of the night, the parents offered tearful pleas to national media, and the little boy was returned, miraculously, unharmed. Through it all, I remained professional — which is often another way of saying "emotionally detached" — from the event I was writing about. A few years later, something odd happened. I was assigned to cover another kidnapping. A father had left his truck running in the dead of winter with a baby in the back while he ran into the house for a moment. Some kids took the truck for a joyride without realizing they had found themselves unwitting kidnappers. The child was recovered unharmed after a few hours. This was a much less-scary story. And, yet, for some reason, I burst into tears while I was trying to file. 

I was totally baffled by my own reaction. I could not understand why the major kidnapping case had been a day at the job, while the minor one broke me. I later brought it up to a long-time photo editor. He shrugged and said: "Trauma accumulates." 

This is true. Trauma accumulates, and there is a lot of it out there these days, and I suspect there’s going to be a lot more to come.

And not all of us are wired to cope with this. If there's anyone else out there who responds to emotion by over intellectualizing, you'll understand the problem here. It's isolating to live your life from the left brain looking out. It's lonely. And part of what it means to be a member of a tribe or a society is to feel what other people are feeling. To connect with them on more than just an abstract and intellectual level. It's no surprise that those of us who struggle with a degree of emotional indifference have a tendency to seek out the extremes of human experience to re-forge that connection. And our society of delights offers no shortage of places to find those highs: pornography of all kinds, war, drugs, radical politics, and haunted mansions. Pick your poison.

"Just be warned," the rabbit said to Alice. "The further down you go, the more exposed you will be to the horror that sent you there in the first place." 

Sooner or later, we all wind up right back at what put us there in the first place. Sooner or later, everybody breaks. Trauma accumulates.

So here it is. Here is my grand, entirely original observation. We’ll start with the dark … but bear with me because I’ll make the round back to light again presently.

Hobbes had it right. Humans are bad. We're barely removed from chimpanzees, primates perfectly capable of organized tribal warfare, and utterly gleeful at the prospect of clubbing each other to death. Nature is a horror show, and we're all just as much a part of nature as all the rest. 

Civilization is a reprieve that has fooled us about ourselves. The institutions that we've created as bulwarks against our own nature have been so successful that they've given us a false understanding of what we are. Dismantle our institutions, or laws, and our norms, and watch how long it takes to reduce us all to a state of constant cruelty, avarice, and endless tribal war. In the beginning, there was the darkness, as the Bible put it, and this is true both morally and literally. Darkness is the baseline. It's the place from which we began. 

But acceptance of that realization demands another — any deviation from the baseline is something ... new. And remarkable. Sometimes we are more than mean clubby monkeys. Sometimes we transcend our tribal instincts and our bloodlust. Sometimes we are capable of organization and altruism for other monkeys, even beyond our own blood. We are capable of sacrificing our own individual interests for a common cause and a greater good. Our history shows us this. We do sometimes rise above.

There was never any guarantee of that, by the way. Most animals do not evolve past the basics of survival. We might have stayed monkeys forever staring at the moon instead of touching it. We probably would have been happier, more at peace with ourselves and the universe, wandering through tropical forests eating seedy bananas and bashing each other over the head for fun. There was no particularly good reason for us to become human.

Yet, we did. The human story is one of increasing complexity unfolding over time. Life, awful life, is the only antidote to entropy. Human lives, our civilizations, our institutions, our morality, our capabilities have all advanced. Uniquely. Bizarrely. It's as if we're evolving in tandem with this grand, organizing, anti-entropic principle over the span of eons. We change, and the principle changes us. 

Sure, there are setbacks. There are outbreaks of barbarity and viciousness and cruelty and mass murder, tragedy and atrocity. Civilizations collapse. Our libraries burn. Knowledge is lost. Everyone dies.

Traumas accumulate.

Yet, we, as a people, come back. Again and again — and always better and stronger and more resilient than what came before. Against the odds and even against our nature, our progress accumulates, too. We envision better versions of ourselves and strive to move toward those ideals. That we are even capable of this is, in and of itself, a miracle. If we can't acknowledge our own evolution as evidence of God, perhaps we can see in it some sign of grace.

All humans are confined to our own limited perspective, trapped by the time in which we exist. It's impossible for any of us to see where we really stand, and in which direction we’re moving. We can only describe the sky as far as we can see it at the moment we look at it.

I'm not optimistic by nature and, like most people, I tend to curse the sun in winter. I forget that it's the sun. I forget that, once, winter was all we knew. 

---

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com