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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 15, 2002
Infantile narcissism
I left off my article on the 9/11 anniversary this last week -- I'd already filled two broadsheet pages -- on a dull note. "Do we have the stomach to do what it will take? Can we stop our whimpering and 'dispute it like a man'?" I alleged that "the infantile narcissism in so much of the post-modern West" prevents us from seeing the threats that bestride our future plainly. The point is hard to make with sufficient force. It has come home to me in the arguments over the past year about what must be done to defend our society our culture our lives and possessions from the direct and real threat of terror attacks with weapons of mass destruction. On the surface the debate has looked like a conventional political argument between "left" and "right"; between "doves" and "hawks". But under this surface there are no shared convictions no knowledge of absolute standards no lines that cannot be crossed no intellectual -- let alone emotional -- defences against a squishy moral relativism. Our civilization is under attack at a moment of deep rot within when almost everywhere we might look for strength -- to the churches the universities high journalism institutions of state leaders in business and arts and society -- we find only children. The battle ahead is hardly unwinnable. The weight of weaponry and organization are entirely on our side. But I have the sinking feeling that were it not for the accident of Messrs. Bush and company occupying the White House or the unusual figure of Tony Blair the West would be unable to make a stand. We would instinctively appease a dreadful enemy until he was in a position to dictate his terms. As I know from the inside my own "babyboom" generation lives in a state of arrested emotional development. I encounter it daily in the media: people making arguments that reduce very quickly to "I feel this" or "I feel that". While this predominates on the left it is hardly confined to that side of the political spectrum; on the right too one is washed by tides of emotional posturing as if every argument came down to How do we feel? In the background noise of our culture its popular entertainment and consumption the distinction seems lost between emotion and behaviour. My parents' generation grew up with no choice but to know this distinction whether or not it was taught. That is why they could handle things like wars. Unfortunately they gave the "babyboom" a choice -- whether to grow up or not -- and failed to notice when we got it wrong. Short of the Christian teaching I embrace and entirely compatible with it is a kind of stoicism. Not an inert but an active stoicism to struggle with the demons. And it is good to have examples around us of people who have struggled and won. Our own kids are very short of such examples. They search for missing heroes for people who act uncynically from belief and rational conviction and not because they are happy or sad; who are fully accountable for their own behaviour. (No one is accountable for "happy" or "sad".) Which is why in turn the quality of our public debate is so shockingly low. For by extension people do not hold themselves accountable for the consequences of their opinions; do not trouble themselves over facts; do not carry the logic of their positions beyond announcing This is how I feel. The arrested emotional development entails necessarily an arrested intellectual development. The latter must await prior phases of personality growth. And the phenomenon is pandemic: I find it daily in my inbox. Again and again I have been asked to "prove" some point that goes against some narcissist's "feelings" and have gone to the trouble of excavating facts and arguments; only to get no immediate reply. A few weeks later comes another demand for "proof" as if the previous exchange hadn't happened. Facts and arguments lie outside the ego a person stuck in his ego cannot take them in. He returns constantly to his default position namely: "This is how I feel." Nothing is a mystery to the small child because everything reduces to "I like this" or "I don't like that". There are days when I have received 20 e-mails on precisely that level: "peace is better than war"; "violence is wrong"; "war is bad and people get hurt" (these are actual quotations). What can you say to such correspondents? ("Yes my darling your mommy and I know that war is horrible. Now sleep tight.") I have "feelings" too. In a moment when I wanted a Requiem Mass this last week we got instead The Rising of Bruce Springsteen. The Elton John of America is what I "feel" about him -- twin candles in the wind. In fact I have no right to an opinion about Mr. Springsteen whose music I have seldom heard and never enjoyed; and I have just had my own ear chewed off by a genuine knowledgeable frighteningly articulate rock'n'roll fan who explained all the clever things Mr. Springsteen was doing in his music rising to polyphony and high dramatic tensions. Which may all be true: he may have risen above infantile narcissism and may have great talent. One does not necessarily entail the other though even to know the difference means rising above narcissism. How often I have seen talented draughtsmen reduced to mere illustrators by their failure to mature. One might even find some brilliantly discerning ear and mind for the expression of poetry in music who knows everything about Springsteen and nothing about Mozart. No skill or talent is a waste entirely; to anyone who discerns them they are a happy reminder of what human beings are capable of doing how high we fly above the apes. Yet in the work itself in the lives of these artists there is something "spoiled". We are not called upon to draw or sing in this trying moment of history. We are only called upon to act our parts -- to forget about our tawdry feelings and become true women and men. Perhaps that is what Mr. Springsteen was also saying and I failed to hear; that what we need is a rising. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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