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“Numbness”
Dave Weissbard
UU Church
Central Square
03/7/10
[powerlessness]
During the course of my ministry, I preached several times on the biblical book of
Job. Job was written as a response to people who insisted that there is a direct tie between
what you do and what happens to you. It is an important lesson to learn that in this world,
what we get may not be what we deserve.
From another perspective, Job can be seen as an example of a powerless individual
who is prepared to accept whatever happens to him - his wife leaves him because he
refuses to get mad, to fight back. One of the hallmarks of contemporary literature is the
abundance of non-heroic central figures who find themselves faced with powers beyond
their comprehension to which they must relate. The heroes of Franz Kafka's novels are
never in a position to take charge of their lives - they are buffeted about by forces well out of
their control. In Arthur Miller's wonderful Death of a Salesman, perhaps the best play of
the last half of this century, a common man sees his life dissolve before him, and passes his
sense of helplessness to his sons. The great play Waiting for Godot is about two non-
heroes who spend their time awaiting the arrival of the central figure, Godot, who may not
even exist.
There is a sense in which this perspective is an important balance to the egocentric
anthropomorphism which believes that the universe was placed here to meet our needs and
to operate by our rules. I once attended a workshop on diversity sponsored by Bahai's. A
Methodist minister who could not be present sent a statement on spirituality in which she
recounted how her God passed the test when she prayed as a child that he help her find a
library book, and how he miraculously saved her father's life because of her prayers for him.
These are examples of why she became a minister. There was, of course, no reference to
the things for which she has prayed which have not happened, and the people whose
prayers for their loved ones bore no fruit. Our conceit that the universe operates on our
rules and to meet our needs can be overwhelming and needs challenging.
At the same time, an overemphasis on our powerlessness has its downside. As we
look collectively and individually at the lives of people in our time, there seems to be an
overwhelming acceptance of the principle that there is really so little that we can do about
anything that we might as well lie back and let life happen to us.
[sources of powerlessness]
What are the sources of this sense of powerlessness? One, it seems to, me, has
been the overemphasis on the psychological dimensions of our behavior. To the extent that
we see ourselves as mere pawns because of the effect of our toilet training or the
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inadequacies of the nurturing of our parents, then we cannot be held responsible for our
actions. The rebel psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, has long crusaded against the psychiatric
exemption for criminal behavior because of what he sees as the implications of such a
decision. Almost by definition, anyone who steals or rapes or murders must be crazy
because those are anti-social acts. The concept of law is placed in jeopardy when we say
that people cannot be held responsible for the things they do, and so is the whole concept of
personal responsibility.
I am not for a moment suggesting that it is not important to understand that our
behavior is affected by more than the present situations we face: any present action does
have roots in the remembered and unconscious past, but that does not absolve us of
responsibility for what we do, if that word, “responsibility” is to have any meaning.
I once did a memorial service for one of the unhappiest men it has been my
challenge to memorialize. He grew up in what his mother and siblings all testified was a
very unhappy home. His father was an alcoholic and abusive. He, in turn became
alcoholic and unable to live with the responsibilities of family life. One of his grown sons
has in turn become alcoholic. Is it in the genes? Possibly. Is it in the environment?
Possibly. While we may understand that what he did had roots beyond himself, must
we at the same time say, “He was therefore not responsible?” What a trap that leads to.
The sense of individual powerlessness is also affected by our awareness of
social pressures. Some say, “We are mere individuals tossed hither and fro in a sea of
pressures that are greater than we are. What can we do about the world when there
are more of “them” than of “us.” - we don't support the waste of energy, or food, or the
waging of wars, or the censorship of reading, or the election to school boards of people
who are committed to turning the clock back a century. We work for the right things -- or
we used to -- without much success. We have learned the hard way that we have little
or no power so we might just as well spend our time in the garden making things grow.
The height of this is represented by a book a few years ago that asserted that
parents actually have no responsibility at all for how their kids turn out. All the power,
we are told, is in the peer group and the values and actions of the parents are
meaningless. That strikes me as the ultimate act of surrender and meaninglessness.
Needless to say, there certainly is a great case that can be built for the utter
powerlessness of the individual. The odds are not even. The deck does seem stacked
against us.
[numbness]
Three decades ago, a New York psychiatrist, Herbert Hendin, wrote a book which
he called The Age of Sensation, in which he reported on a study of a randomly chosen
group of students at Columbia and Barnard who were paid to participate - that is, they
were not psychiatric patients.
Hendin's book came out at the same time as books like Charles Reich's Greening
of America were promising a new age because of the idealism of the student
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generation. In contrast, Hendin foresaw cause for despair. His research suggested that
the generation now in its fifties was distinguished in its twenties by an “active pursuit of
disengagement, detachment, fragmentation, and emotional numbness.” Because of
their fear of being out of control, of being powerless, the concept of commitment to
anyone or anything was almost entirely lacking in the students with whom he conducted
interviews. Hendin reported:
Virtually no one grows up in this culture today without deep and painful conflicts
over involvement and commitment. Even those who are dealing best with life
show the numbness and pleasurelessness of the general flight from emotion.
The young women with whom he spoke:
see life as fatal to the woman who is not impenetrably cool. Increasingly they
arm themselves with a vision of reality as threatening. Game, plucky, the
women students I saw are determined not to be overwhelmed by experience.
But in the search for an antidote to emotion, they often find that they have killed
their power to care deeply for anyone.”
As for the males, they:
all dreamed of emotion as a fire to be extinguished, a stampede of cattle that
should be corralled, as a disease that would destroy, a weapon that could kill. . .
. Working at making life not matter may be intended simply to remove the
depressions, the hurts, the angers that afflict, leaving only the better emotions.
Yet, the habit of detachment, once acquired, leads inevitably to a general
numbing in the face of all experience.
Back in 1976, Hendin pointed to the rise in rates of drug use, suicide, and
impotence, as symptoms of the malaise of numbness. As that generation has moved
into adulthood and middle age, Hendin's prophecy, which did not receive a lot of
attention, did, I would suggest, come to fruition.
The fear of being hurt, of being disappointed, of being let down, because of a
lack of power to impact the world has led to a proliferation of numbness. If you are
wooden or plastic, you can't get hurt. Unlike Pinocchio who wanted to go from being
wooden to being human, people today seem to flee from humanity to woodenness. Life
has become a defensive action rather than an exploration; people prefer to be
spectators rather than participants.
The more apathetic we feel, the further we distance ourselves from the arena of
life, the more apathetic we feel. It gets to the point where we almost dare life to make
us feel anything. We turn off our feelings so we won't be disappointed and then we get
more disappointed because we are feeling less. It is a vicious circle of the first degree.
[breaking through]
Some people try to break through the numbness by seeking intense pleasure -
through drugs, through sexual adventures that call for no commitment (as, for instance,
casual sex with interns, or exciting extra-marital or extra-relationship affairs), or through
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other risk taking behaviors. The problem is that these attempts to feel intense feelings,
to break through the numbness, do not seem to do the job for long. They are like junk
food which tastes good but does not nourish. The numbness returns, sometimes with
even more intensity.
Some people try to deal with the numbness by seeking authoritative religious
answers that assure them that while they are not in control, surrender to a higher power
is where security lies. This, I would suggest, is the reason for the resurgence of both
authoritarian and new age religious enthusiasm, both of which offer assurance that
powerlessness is appropriate.
[making a difference]
There is an alternative. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, there is a
human experience which challenges the too neat picture of insurmountable
powerlessness, and that is the experience we sometimes have of feeling like we have
made a difference. It may not be rational - maybe it can be explained away as a
delusion - but there are always some people in this world who challenge the assumption
that who we are and how we live does not matter -- who suggest that from their
experience, who we are and what we do does matter -- very much.
We could be talking here about heroes and heroines, but what I really have in
mind is people of the much more common variety - the people like us who live as if they
are responsible, as if what they do matters. They may not have great monuments
erected in their memories, but they are the ones whom, when we come to celebrate
their lives, we can look back upon and point to with pride. These are the people who
seem to have the richest and most meaningful lives. How do we move from apathy and
impotence to involvement and powerful living, if it wasn't all predetermined by a god or
your toilet training?
[love and power]
Let me offer two clues: love and power, which are surprisingly related.
There seems to be a direct correlation between isolation and powerlessness.
There is a chicken or egg question here, but I would suggest that those who have a
profound sense of being alone, of having no other human beings to trust, demonstrate a
greater difficulty in taking hold of their lives than those who are involved with others, or,
to put it positively, those who make a deep and genuine commitment to others have a
greater likelihood of finding meaning in their lives. That commitment to others can be on
the individual level or on the larger, community level. I’m going to focus this morning on
the latter, although much of what I will say relates to both.
[community]
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Rollo May, in his book Power and Innocence, suggested that violence is a
manifestation of impotence and the resolution he proposes lies in community:
Violence is a symptom. The disease is variously powerlessness, insignificance,
injustice – in short, a conviction that I am less than human and I am homeless in
the world . ... Communication with other persons helps us to discover the original
“we-ness” of the human being on a new level, and communication leads to
community.
May goes on to say:
Community is where I can accept my own loneliness, distinguishing between that
part of it which can be overcome and that part of it which is inescapable.
Community is the group in which I can depend upon my fellows to support me; it is
partially the source of my physical courage in that, knowing that I can depend
upon others, I also guarantee that they can depend on me. It is where my moral
courage, consisting of standing against members of my own community, is
supported even by those I stand against.
In contrast to the “pseudo innocence” that permits us individually to eschew
responsibility for what is happening in the world, commitment to community seems to
call us to a new sense of responsibility and involvement in the world, and to offer us the
opportunities to live that involvement.
Now, I want to acknowledge that commitment to community does have its risks.
Communities are never perfect - they can let us down at times - in fact they are
certain to some of the time. No community can be guaranteed to meet all of our
needs all of the time. The very success of a community depends upon our ability to
realize that we have no right to expect all of our needs to be met - a community is not
an extension of our narcissism - it demands recognition that there are times when the
common good takes precedence over personal desires. That, in fact, is part of what
makes relationships and community work for us - the realization that life is not all
about us, and that there are times when we receive by giving.
[the church]
This church, of course, is just such a community. Looking at the variety of
relationships people have with this church community demonstrates both the potential
that community offers, and the fear that some of us have of commitment. There are
people who hang at the edge - who are not able to really commit, to become involved
because of their fear that they might be disappointed or hurt. One thing is for sure, they
are certain never to be satisfied, to receive what they want, because they are unprepared
to risk giving of themselves. Such people tend to come and go.
I must confess that I have also, over the years, known a couple of people who
became intensely involved in churches in the hope that they could fill a tremendous
chasm in their being. Their hunger was insatiable, possibly because the focus
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remained on them and on their needs and it never really was on the community, on “us”
instead of “me.”
I can honestly say that I have remained professionally involved in Unitarian
Universalist churches for 45 years because of being blessed by knowing people who
have found their church to be a place where they could genuinely engage in the
experience of community in a way which brought greater meaning to their lives. Most of
them have been disappointed at times, but the depth of their commitment carried them
through and kept them open to new possibilities and new rewards.
You may have noted the dual dimensions of the themes of commitment (love) and
power - the ability to do things, to make an impact. It is these two, taken together, which
are the antidote to numbness.
[Buber]
Martin Buber, writing of the need we have to have an impact upon the world in
which we live, spoke of the relationship between power and love. He observed:
Our hope is too new and too old –
I do not know what would remain to us
Were love not transfigured power
And power not straying love.
Do not protest, “Let love alone rule!”
Can you prove it true?
But resolve: every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love deed -Yes and the power deed No
And pressing forward, honor reality.
We cannot avoid power.
Using power
Cannot escape the compulsion
to afflict the world.
So let us, cautious in diction
and mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully.