AN EXISTENTIAL NEW YEAR’S WISH: HOPE IN A TIME OF DESPAIR

By Jerry D. Rose

A year ago today, as 2009 dawned, there was among many people in America and the rest of the world a somewhat euphoric feeling of hope that the election of a new political order would herald in a time of much improved conditions. That was then, this is now; and David Swanson described a couple of days ago a mood and practice of “defeatism” that swept the land in 2009 in which people were willing enough to complain about the recession and about any hope of any better health care or education or any relatively quick and painless cessaton in our overseas military operations—but reluctant to take any action to deal with those situations.  It seemed to Swanson and seems to me that a shrug of the shoulders has become the poster person reaction of people to our current ails.

Is this just the typical aftermath of “too much Christmas”: too much to eat and drink, too much sleep lost, too much anxiety about family reunions, the affordability of Christmas presents and disappointment that that our yearning for peace was frustrated on Christmas Day itself when there was an apparently near-disaster from a terrorist with explosives sewn inside his underwear as it prepared to land in Detroit?  Maybe, but these recurring stresses of the season and other incidents such as the Israeli invasion of Gaza a year ago would argue against this New Year’s angst as a “normal” response to the normal stresses of a season.  What is producing this exceptional “defeatism” as we approach another year?

Of course much of it has to do with the November 2008 election of a “Hope and Change” presidency, which seemed to promise that, for once, the hopes for a changed world that arises on every New Year’s eve might actually bring about a successful new year to replace the tired and tattered old one.  What happened, with relentless consistency over this year, was a dawning realization that things were changing very little indeed: that the corporate and military domination of policies both domestic and foreign had produced precious little change for the benefit of anyone except those corporate and military entities.  Bank bailouts at the beginning of the year and the prospect at the end of the year of a totally “compromised” health care “reform” measure were accompanied by continued high unemployment, stagnant wages for workers, mortgage foreclosures for many homeowners and the prospect of a health care reform measure that will not improve their health but will deliver huge profits to the health and insurance industries. The long-anticipated and finally-enacted escalation of troop strength to Afghanistan, at about the time that President Obama was accepting a Nobel Peace Prize and giving a remarkable acceptance speech that justified warfare has seemingly discouraged if not disabled the peace movement that helped him gain election but has now been thrown under the bus with assorted other used-and-tossed debris.  No wonder many are feeling “defeated.”  As was seen at the health care forums, about the only Americans who showed any political life were the “tea-baggers” who showed up to complain about contemplated “socialized medicine” and further government intrusion on our “freedoms.”

So what’s a progressive person to do in this time of malaise for the causes of peace and justice?  I recently directed a play (Independence) in which one of the characters gets some very bad news about the infidelity of her boy friend, goes into a frenzy of crying, at which her older sister says “Look, there are two way of handling this” and the younger sister interjects: “Yeah, suicide and what?”  A symbolic form of suicide is seen among the walking zombies of Obama enthusiasts who see nothing ahead but further disappointment.  But it’s the “what?” alternative that I want to address, since I am not now nor never have I ever been a “defeatist.”  For that I owe the influence on my life of a type of philosophy known as existentialism, as reflected most notably in the work of John Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

The basic tenet of existentialism is that human being are born free and are “doomed to freedom.”  Every effort to limit our actions to what we deem to be possible based on circumstances external to ourselves is a matter of “bad faith.”  When President Obama says he would prefer to have a single payer health system if he were starting from “scratch,” but is unable to do so because of the present political “situation,” he is exercising bad faith.  When Obama in his peace prize speech extolls the pacifism of Gandhi and M.L. King, but says we has to life in the “real” world where war has its justifications, he is exercising bad faith.  When everyone one of us as a voter who, as a free actor, would vote for the candidate for office most closely aligned with our preferences, says that he/she cannot vote for that candidate but must choose the “lesser evil” of one of the two  branches of the corporate duopoly with two very similar Republican and Democratic branches, we are exercising bad faith.  Put otherwise, our sense of circumstantial constraint makes us passive or “defeatist,” and we leave the field of political combat for those “fanatics” who have a heart for standing their ground for strongly held beliefs.  We become political “idiots” in the sense of people divorced from any ideological principal: if we’re not defeatists we become pragmatic “compromisers.”  This is the “suicide” of which both Swanson and the existentialists speak.

So again, or what?  How do we maintain our identity as principled progressives, as those with the heart to work for the principles of peace and justice when so many “circumstances” in the world tell us that what we seek is impossible.  Here Camus’ essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,”  is of a great deal of help to me.  Sisyphus is a mythological being who, for some transgression, has been condemned to roll a rock to the top of a hill when, every time he reaches the top, it rolls to the bottom.  So what keeps him at his “unrealistic” task?  Simply that he represents the fate of humanity at large, which mandates that people find their happiness in the struggle itself, no matter the outcome of that struggle. As one finds Camus quoted in Bartlett’s Quotations, “The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man.  One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.”

My wish, then, to every reader of this: that you will find happiness and a fulfilled heart in the New Year in the eternal struggle to arrive at the mountaintop of peace and justice toward which we, as “fellow travellers to the grave,” are embarked.

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Jerry D. Rose is editor of The Sun State Activist