What would you rather feel, sadness or fear? It seems to me that, today, in a world where no one can stand to watch Old Yeller anymore (although I will grant “Me and Marley” apparently did well), that fear is easier for most. And for the “rational” fear is perhaps easier to rationalize. It is a relic of the fight or flight response; it is an evolutionary adaptation.
I believe, increasingly (and obviously I assert many things on this blog, but in dealing with deep emotion it is hard to be confident in large scale generalizations; this does not mean one should not attempt them in the pursuit of deeper understandings) that fear in our culture increasingly substitutes for sadness.
Take “50 Shades of Gray”, I hear it is now called “mommy porn”, and can attest to at least one mother of three who appears psychologically normal enjoying reading it at the pool. I think it was an act of rebellion in an endless process of getting kids from here to there, feeding them, dealing with their crap of all sorts, dealing with the husband, and the thousand things that home makers do.
Such women become sad, not infrequently. There are often assumed, not appreciated. How tempting it must be to feel fear–and S and M is sex plus fear of the unknown–in place of that ambient sadness. Hence that book has set new sales records, and I think has sold the most the quickest of any single book in UK history (as I hear anecdotally on the radio; certainly it has sold many, many millions of copies, and is according to one account has even been sold on large tables in supermarkets; I know I’ve seen it displayed prominently at Target, which is otherwise a bland middle class store not in the business of selling sadomasochistic literature).
The converse of this is that it is hard to justify irrational joy, exultation. We all feel pride at accomplishment, at the accomplishments of our children. We feel happy when something WORKS, especially after long labor. But do we come even close to approaching the amount of happiness we COULD feel? Do we truly allow our hearts to fill to overflowing? No: I think most are emotionally timid. In America at least, as adults, we have a relatively narrow bandwidth of permissable emotions. I think this is true, but I may be wrong.
Then I get the sense of the scientistic that their worldview enables a profound esthetic appreciation of the universe, of order, of the brilliance of the blind watchmaker, of natural “law”. Yet, I would contend that what they are feeling is a sense of superiority to matter, through their “understanding”. They stand apart, gazing, “knowing”, as they feel. But their own presuppositions prevent this from being a tenable view, finally. Examined carefully, they are not apart from the universe in any way. Everything they think, and that they feel, is of a piece with matter. They are no more free than ants laboring to feed their colony. They are no more free than pieces of rock duly traversing the sun in their obedience to gravity.
I have no objections to Empiricism. I want MORE of it, not less. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the propositions that we survive death, that we can communicate telepathically, can foresee the future, can see things psychically at a distance from us, and much more. The problem is not that the data is lacking, but that it cannot find its way into the research arms of “mainstream” universities, and thus get added in what would UNQUESTIONABLY be a useful way to our national and global dialogues.
My short question is this: why invest so much energy in the pursuit of death, when life is an obvious alternative?