Eighty-five years ago, G. K. Chesterton looked at his
society and saw some things that disturbed him. Here's his
comment:
There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is
tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being a robber
or a noble savage. It is then that he torments the cat.
There comes a time in the routine of an ordered
civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology
and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon
made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the
same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and
dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase
the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling
obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek
after mad religions for the same reason. They try to stab
their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the
priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try
to wake themselves up with nightmares.
Ah, the genius of Chesterton! I read this passage years
ago and have never forgotten it. Even if one doesn't fully
agree with his assessment, nobody can argue with his
expression. Moreover it doesn't strain the imagination to
see evidence of what he is expressing inside of our own
culture today. Salient examples abound: The illegal drug
trade is one of the biggest industries in the world,
internet pornography is the biggest addiction in the
world, excessive use of alcohol is everywhere,
high-profile athletes and entertainers brag that they have
slept with thousands of people, even as they go in and out
of rehab regularly, celebrities show up at parties
carrying briefcases full of cocaine, and drug dealers
already find a market among our elementary school
students. Evidently many of us today are also trying to
stab our nerves to life by constantly increasing the
dosage.
But we need not look at the lives of rich and the famous
to see this. None of us are immune. We just do this more
subtly. Take, for example, our addictive struggle with
information technology. It's not that the internet and the
myriad of programs, phones, pads, gadgets, and games that
are linked to it are bad. They aren't. In fact we are a
very lucky generation to have such instant and constant
access to information and to each other. Ever smarter
phones, better internet programs, and things such as
Facebook are not the problem. Our problem is in handling
them in a non-addictive way, both in how we respond to the
pressure to constantly buy ever-newer, faster, flashy, and
more capable technologies, and in our inability to not let
them control our lives. We too perpetually tire of what we
have and seek somehow to increase the dosage to stab our
nerves into life.
Whenever that happens we begin to lose control of our
lives and find ourselves on a dangerous treadmill upon
which we begin to lose any sense of real enjoyment in
life.
Antoine Vergote, the famed Belgium psychologist, had a
mantra which read: Excess is a substitute for genuine
enjoyment. We go to excess in things because we can no
longer enjoy them simply. It's when we no longer enjoy our
food that we overeat; it's when we no longer enjoy a drink
that we drink to excess; it's when we no longer enjoy a
simple party that we let things get out of hand; it's when
we can no longer enjoy a simple game that we need extreme
sports, and it's when we no longer simply enjoy the taste
of chocolate that we try to eat all the chocolate in the
world. The same principle holds true, even more strongly,
for the enjoyment of sex.
Moreover excess isn't just a substitute for enjoyment;
it's also the very thing that drains all enjoyment from
our lives. Every recovering addict will tell us that. When
excess enters, enjoyment departs, as does freedom.
Compulsion sets in. Now we begin to seek a thing not
because it will bring us enjoyment, but because we are
driven to have it. Excess is a substitute for enjoyment
and because it doesn't bring genuine enjoyment it pushes
us on to further excess, to something more extreme, in the
hope that the enjoyment we are seeking will eventually be
induced. That's what Chesterton's metaphors - tormenting
the cat and stabbing our nerves back into life - express.
The answer? A simpler life. But that is easier said than
done. We live with constant pressure, from without and
from within, to see more, consume more, buy more, and
drink in more of life. The pressure to increase the dosage
is constant and unrelenting. But this is precisely where a
deliberate, willful, and hard asceticism is demanded of
us. To quote Mary Jo Leddy, we must, at some point say
this, mean it, and live it: It's enough. I have enough. I
am enough. Life is enough. I need to gratefully enjoy what
I have.
Fr. Ron Rolheiser
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