The World that Forgot How to Feel
I started writing this Note several years ago. It was about the time that there was another flurry of those ‘Was Jane Austen a feminist?’ articles online and I made the mistake of reading the ‘below the line’ comments on one of them. Amid all the criticism was someone who said that she or he hated a particular character in Pride & Prejudice because ‘he made me want to reach through the page and punch him in the face’. The writer of that comment assumed that that was a criticism of the author’s skill rather than a compliment.
I had a similar experience some years before, when I was visiting the National Gallery in London with a girlfriend or rather, the relevant experience happened after the visit. After wandering around the galleries, we met up with a friend of mine who was living in London at the time. Friend asked Girlfriend about what she had thought of the art that she had seen. She commented on a few paintings that she had liked before adding that she had found a painting of the execution of Lady Jane Grey ‘upsetting’. Friend asked her, “Is it a bad painting if it upsets you?”
It may seem initially absurd if I tell you that our society has forgotten how to feel or rather that it has become wary of feeling things. Switch on Strictly Come Dancing and you will see celebrities crying at the emotion of dancing, listen to the impassioned pleas of the people on reality television shows who ‘want it more than anything’ or pick up a newspaper for the latest celebrity gossip and you will find all sorts of problems laid bare. If I tell you that a few years ago I saw a front page headline about Gary Barlow’s wife having a miscarriage and thought ‘why should that interest me?’, you will probably think me heartless.
My problem is not with Gary Barlow’s wife. Her situation was tragic and I am sure that the two of them were very deeply affected by their loss. Indeed, miscarriage is one of those subjects that is rarely talked about (though it is a sadly common phenomenon), but I do not think that the newspaper was trying to highlight a cause or make debate more open. For me, it is more pertinent to point out that grief used to be private. I am not doubting that it is genuine (which is what makes me sound heartless), I am questioning the way in which it has become a headline which will easily be forgotten tomorrow when we are back to how Jeremy Corbyn beats kittens over the head with courgettes grown on his allotment (the photos the Labour Party did not want you to see, only in The Sun). Grief is not so easily switched off.
It is a hard balance to argue. On the one hand, we run away from negative emotions. It is more than the ‘cheer up’ or ‘have a nice day’ comments, it is the making unhappy people feel as though their emotions are invalid. Some years ago a friend of mine told me about how he had split up with his girlfriend the night before a major birthday. They had been together for a few years, but they both recognised that things were going nowhere. It was sad and, although he knew that he would recover in time, he needed time to cope with this. Unfortunately, all the friends he knew either gave him platitudes ‘many more fish in the sea’ or tried to fix him up with other people to ‘take his mind off her’. What he desperately needed was to be sad and deal with what he was going through.
Been there, done that, got the comments – the worst probably being when I was mourning and so would not commit to someone’s future plans, only to be asked, “How long are you going to be mourning for?” Try the rest of my life.
On the other hand, you do need to start to see the tragedies of life as part of what makes you who you are and something unavoidable that everyone needs to confront. There is another Note being written about how some people allow one tragic event to define their lives and they are never able to integrate that event into their life and let it be part of them. It is not so much ‘moving on’ as ‘coping with what has happened’.
Then again, is this not what the ex-girlfriend in the gallery was doing? She disliked a painting that was upsetting and so rather than dealing with why she was upset, she blamed the painting. In fact, what if our society’s new-found love of outward emotion from its celebrities is actually a way of avoiding dealing with things? I have friends who have special routines for the anniversary of losing a baby. Perhaps the Barlows do this too. I do not know, but I do know that it will not be covered by The Sun.
The reason that all this has become relevant again is the political situation that 2016 has brought upon us. I think that the hankering for paintings that do not upset us or quick bursts of celebrity gossip with no follow-up has a political side too. Does anyone other than Donald Trump really think that he can recreate manufacturing industry in the USA? Try explaining to many people that we do not live in a world of import and export where things are made of components only made in one country - no, no, no, they will say, we can live without a ‘trade deal’ with the EU where we can get on with making ‘British things’. In 2016 we have been awash with simple solutions for complex problems. I see this as the political equivalent of wanting art and literature not to upset you.
I may not think very much of Donald Trump but he has been elected President of the USA by an ‘overwhelming’ 27% of the US population, crushing his opponent’s meagre 28% of the population. Despite the vagaries of the US electoral system, the man is President(-elect) and there is a lot for people to oppose over the coming four years. This is not like 2012, when people were encouraged to go out on the streets and protest about the re-election of Barack Obama by a little-known man named Donald Trump.
Some people have decided to go out and vent their anger. There has been much criticism of this, as if being angry about the result is not legitimate. It is as if having an emotional reaction to something is wrong or rather, having an emotional reaction that is different to other people’s is wrong. Someone posted a picture of protestors along with the line ‘privilege : going out to protest for four days because you don’t have to worry about going to work the next day’. This was a particularly silly comment which could easily be answered with ‘Privilege : thinking that there is no reason to protest because your unearned advantages in life insulate you from the problems to come’, ‘Privilege : finding a random photo of people whose views you disagree with and making assumptions about them all’ or ‘Privilege : thinking that other people’s anger must be illegitimate’.
Being a human being is a complicated business. It is never entirely happy and it is never entirely unhappy. In every life, in every year, in every month, in every week, in every day, there is a mixture of the happy and the sad. That is life and part of our challenge is to find the ways to enjoy the happy and to cope with the sad. None of us should expect happiness all the time or, indeed, unhappiness all the time. Life is just not like that.
Unless you are a politician, in which case telling people that life is complex is unfashionable. We want simple solutions that promise everything at no cost and no-one is willing to tell us that we cannot have it. Why? I think that it is because somewhere along the way we became very frightened of feeling things. Emotion is now a sound bite and a reality television back story and you should jump out of bed every morning and join the blissful dawn of a new golden era where everything will be perfect ... even the trains will run on time.