Weavy Grievy

Tank top from Etsy. Library not for sale.

World-famous Judaeo-Christian existentialist philosopher David F. Brooks shows up to comfort us all with the knowledge that the lemons of global pandemic make great moral lemonade, if you add enough sugar ("The Moral Meaning of the Plague"):

Life and death can seem completely arbitrary. Religions and philosophies can seem like cruel jokes. The only thing that matters is survival. Without the inspiration of a higher meaning, selfishness takes over.

This mind-set is the temptation of the hour — but of course it’s wrong. We’ll look back on this as one of the most meaningful periods of our lives.

Viktor Frankl, writing from the madness of the Holocaust, reminded us that we don’t get to choose our difficulties, but we do have the freedom to select our responses. Meaning, he argued, comes from three things: the work we offer in times of crisis, the love we give and our ability to display courage in the face of suffering. The menace may be subhuman or superhuman, but we all have the option of asserting our own dignity, even to the end.

Frankl was, of course, an Austrian-Jewish psychologist and one of the founders of existential psychoanalysis, who continued to work in Vienna hospitals from the Anschluß in 1938 until he was arrested and interned in the first of several concentration camps, Terezín, in 1942, though his central ideas on existential analysis and "logotherapy" were in fact largely formed before that, but you can see how that trinity of work, love, and courage rhymes with some other thinkers in the existential orbit, notably Albert Camus "writing from" the intensity of the Resistance.

From this standpoint there really is no transcendent "higher" meaning to appeal to, and yet, as we know, different people react to crisis in different ways (illustrated in Camus's Algerian town in The Plague), some selfishly, some neurotically, some trying their best to act in good faith, most in a complex mixture. We may well look back on this moment as especially meaningful because we've had to put so much into it.

Brooks, writing from the crucible of a lifetime of comfortable shallowness, permits himself to differ from Frankl with a Brooksian offhand gesture:

I’d add one other source of meaning. It’s the story we tell about this moment. It’s the way we tie our moment of suffering to a larger narrative of redemption. It’s the way we then go out and stubbornly live out that story. The plague today is an invisible monster, but it gives birth to a better world.

No, no, no, no, no! "Love your three laws, Professor Newton, but I'd add that most motions are for the best, in the long run."

Only that's not just an inane "addition" but a downright inversion. If you understand the approach you understand that life and death really are arbitrary and the promises of that kind of religion and philosophy that holds out a guarantee of transcendence really are cruel jokes. Storytelling is absolutely at the heart of the logotherapy method, but it's the story you tell yourself about yourself after the moment, not some canned narrative that you pick up at the redemption store on the way to the moment.

The truthful story is of those immanent qualities—work, love, and courage are as good a list as any—with which we've confronted the absurdity. Setting off on your journey with a story claiming it isn't actually absurd is a way to ensure that you live your moment in bad faith and wind up with a story that isn't true, or therapeutically useful, at all.

Sure enough—

There’s a new action coming into the world, too. I was on a Zoom call this week with 3,000 college students hosted by the Veritas Forum. One question was on all their minds: What can I do right now?

I was on another Zoom call with 30 Weavers, and each one of them had begun some new activity to serve their neighbors. One lady was passing out vegetable seeds so families could plant their own vegetable gardens. Others are turning those tiny front-yard libraries into front-yard pantries. Some people are putting the holiday lights back up on their houses just to spread some cheer. You can share your social innovation here.

Brooks's story is about what a great person he's going to be, Weaving and grieving and telling everybody what great people they're going to be as they participate in the great redemption in their different ways, some of us lecturing audiences of thousands and passing out spiritual nutrition like Wavy Gravy distributing food at the Woodstock Festival, and others—don't be put off by my magnificence, there's something for you too—putting up Christmas lights on their pathetic little houses. Does anybody know what a front-yard library is? (I found out, see above.)