A friend sent me this interesting piece over the weekend. It takes a whack at that beloved and now ubiquitous memefied advice of Mr. Rogers to “look for the helpers.” That’s very good counsel for children, who were Mr. Roger’s intended audience, but not for adults who are supposed to be the helpers.
What’s so good about the quote, as the author points out, is that it illuminates for us how helpless most of us feel in this current political climate. What are we supposed to do? Vote? Just kidding—everyone should vote. But voting in modern America is too much like Richard Carstone in Bleak House trying to get justice for his suit in 19th century England. It’s funny and ridiculous, especially when at the end he finds out that all the money he hoped to inherit has been eaten up by the law, and so he dies tragically. It’s very romantic, and it’s the futility of it all that makes it so. Everyone sits helplessly by, praying to God, and the only thing that God does is—well, it’s a novel, and Dickens was by no means a believer.
But his view of the order of things was very modern. Justice isn’t done. God doesn’t care. Most people do ridiculous and unhelpful things, hindering the happiness and well being of others, and above all ruining their lives. But the heroine is certainly a helper. All she does is help. And it’s enough for you to feel happy in the final chapter, which is fine, because you, by which I mean me, didn’t like Richard all that much as a character anyway.
In other words, one ‘help’ for psychological well-being is being able to identify the villain. If you can have an enemy out there, something real to fight against, some truth that is opposed to some evil that helps you make sense of the world, then you can go on. You don’t feel so helpless. But when it’s all a jumbled mess and all the enemies are on every side and you yourself are one of the enemies, in a cosmic sense, being evil rather than good, and you know there’s not going to be justice or mercy in any temporal sense, then you just go hide under your covers or search for that perfect meme on Pinterest. I mean, I don’t do that of course, I devote myself to prayer and good works. I never bury my head in the internet sand, trying to dull the sharp misery of helplessness and rage.
What’s so depressing, to me, is that just at the moment in human history when the issues are so complex, so tangled, so legion, when there are so many different kinds of people jumbled together with their various backgrounds and beliefs, often truly opposed to one another, but certainly full up to the brim of fascinating historical and cultural nuance that cannot be understood in a thirty second sound bite—at that moment we have lost our attention span to the point of catastrophe, and not only don’t want to, but in many cases cannot understand the depth and riches of human dysfunction. We are intellectual children, looking for comforting helpers, and finding none.
As a dispiriting thought exercise I sometimes, when I am quietly relishing another line of Black Lamb Gray Falcon, which I have been reading since 1998, like to imagine Rebecca West wandering around America as she did the Balkans, in between the wars. What would she see and say? What would she write? She would certainly experience a profound loathing. She would not find very much of beauty to describe. She would not want to haul that glorious fat book of drawings around in a wheelbarrow, trying to trace out the lines of our once great civilization. She would gingerly sip out of one of our vats of coffee and go back home to her adult age, shuddering.
I mean, Christians should be able to say, “God is our helper,” and that he is “a very present help in times of trouble.” But I think we have a hard time wanting the kind of help we know he will give. We known, way back in the recesses our spiritual personhood, that it will be painful, that it will mean the death of our glory, that all the money will be eaten up by the Byzantine troubles of this life, that we will die tragically, and probably even without romance, and that the news cycle will forget about us even before the blood has dried on the pavement. I don’t want God to help me die, to myself or anyone, we mutter, scrolling furiously for another meme, clicking happily and without irony on the “Look for the Helpers” one because it is easier to be a child than to find that God’s helping way usually always means me being physically and spiritually uncomfortable.
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