A neighbor and I were talking about cleaning out the houses of people born in 1937. They were born too late to have any explicit memory of the Great Depression, but still absorbed the natural response to material scarcity, which is to save every last piece of twine that passes through a household, never to discard anything that might prove useful in the future.
It's a wholesome inclination not to waste reusable odds and ends, until a house becomes so cluttered that nothing can be found for reuse anyway.
My neighbor said that kids born in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001 suffered from terrible anxiety, even though they have no explicit memory of the event. Somehow they absorbed the anger and dread it produced. As for the kids who were little during 2020 and 2021, she says, we'll have to wait and see.
Except in extreme expressions, anxiety and depression are not pathological conditions in need of medical scrutiny and pharmacological correction. They are reasonable responses to the spirit of our hyper-technical age and its millions of manifestations, from existential threats (nuclear catastrophe, anthropogenic climate change, plastic particles in our very blood) to lesser indignities, intrusions, and thefts (televised drug advertisements, tinny noise from speakers of greasy smartphones played everywhere, administrative takeover of higher education and the resulting student loan "crisis").
The paradox is that when we designate anxiety and depression as medical conditions residing in a sick individual, we make the "condition" something that the afflicted individual is responsible for at the same time that we depersonalize the "condition," which really is the beginning of a personal response to the mass phenomena of our age.
A diagnosis becomes an erasure of memory; a prescription stifles the formation of a response. What we need in our daily lives is time, quiet, and freedom for comprehension. And comprehension, as Hannah Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," requires "examining and bearing consciously the burden that our century has placed on us--neither denying its existence nor submitting to its weight."
Our attention is so rapidly redirected from one mass phenomenon to the next that we never have time to begin to comprehend, to articulate our response; when we don't have time or space to reckon with reality or even dismiss ephemera as such, when we forget and move on to the next distraction, the rage and fear from the last event remain with us not as memory but as a sludge that depression and anxiety crawl out of. And that's true whether the event is global, local, or personal in terms of the amount and kind of attention it received.
In "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," originally written in Czech between 1976 and 1978, Milan Kundera recalls a succession of events that commanded brief attention from all over the globe, only to be forgotten: "The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and on and on, until everyone has forgotten everything."
Kundera lists the events out of order, I suppose, to underscore his point about forgetting. It was 1971, before the death of Salvador Allende, when soldiers from West Pakistan (now Pakistan) infiltrated what was then called East Pakistan, on the opposite side of India, and killed at least 500,000 Bengali-speaking people. President Nixon maintained U.S. support for Pakistan on the advice of Henry Kissinger. The massacre ended only because Pakistan declared war on India in December 1971. Pakistan quickly lost, and Bangladesh gained independence. If these events seem unfamiliar, that's Kundera's point.
Upon the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, the Republic of Czechoslovakia was created to encompass lands occupied by German-, Yiddish-, Czech-, Slovak-, and Hungarian-speaking peoples. The western part of what is now the Czech Republic is known as Bohemia, and the western part of Bohemia has long been occupied by a German-speaking majority.
Kundera, who died July 11 at the age of 94, lived through Germany's seizure of the German-speaking parts of Bohemia under the Munich Agreement ("Peace for our time!") of 1938, and its annexation or control of the rest of Czechoslovakia from 1939-1945.
Kundera lived through the Soviet liberation of Prague in 1945 and the Czechoslovakian elite's subsequent elevation of the Communist Party. He was not fond of discussing his own biography (for good reason, it turns out), so I'll turn to his "fictional" account (from "Laughter and Forgetting") of the rise, diminishment, and resurgence of the totalitarian impulse in his native country:
"The people were enthusiastic about the Russia that had driven out the Germans, and seeing in the Czech Communist Party its faithful arm, they became sympathetic to it. So the Communists took power in 1948 with neither bloodshed nor violence, but greeted by the cheers of about half the nation. And now, please note: The half that did the cheering was the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better.
"Yes, say what you will, the Communists were more intelligent. They had an imposing program. A plan for an entirely new world where everyone would find a place. The opponents had no great dream, only some tiresome and threadbare moral principles, with which they tried to patch the torn trousers of the established order." ("Patching torn trousers" could be the slogan of Arkansas' remaining Rockefeller Republicans.)
The great dream of the Czech Communists was of an inclusive idyll for all. But some people knew they didn't fit and tried to leave; others tried to fit and couldn't, perhaps they couldn't keep up with the evolving orthodoxies, or remained aligned with people who had fallen out of favor.
Because the dream was an idyll for all, those who could not or would not fit had to be smudged out of the idyll: denied a vocation, thrown behind bars, or simply made to disappear.
Some of the former bright young things who had embraced communism recognized that their experiment, their dream, had gotten out of hand, and they "rebelled against their own youth." By 1968, they had dialed back their censoriousness and allowed for the liberalization known as the Prague Spring. But on Aug. 21, 1968, the Russian tanks rolled in.
. . .
A totalitarian state is bound by no laws and driven by the sentiments of whoever's just made it to the top of the greasy pole. The state seeks to control all aspects of life and can crush any person, institution, idea, or memory that doesn't fit into the great dream.
Kundera rejected totalitarianism and embraced, in the words of Roger Kimball, "the fundamental Enlightenment values of skeptical rationality and individualism," or the traditional liberal values (in Kundera's words) of "respect for the individual, for his original thought, and for his inviolable private life." In the 1980s, Kimball and other conservative critics took Kundera to task for refusing to acknowledge any difference between the intrusions of the totalitarian state upon the original thought and inviolable private life of the individual, and the intrusions, in democratic regimes, of mass culture on the same.
Thanks in part to Kundera's influence, I've spent the past 25 years trying to resist mass culture, but it is pervasive and intrusive; it is hard, as some Disney-resisting parents of young children tell me, to keep the Mouse out of the house. Unlike Kundera, I am quite willing to acknowledge the difference between the wearying, alienating effects of mass culture and the terror and violence inflicted by totalitarian regimes. I do wonder if conservative critics like Kimball would acknowledge now that mass culture is more hospitable to the totalitarian impulse than they recognized in the 1980s.
. . .
Kundera has come under attack for some of the things he wrote about women. It's doubtful his novels would get published today. In fact, I fear that many writers today would not permit themselves to think some of the things he wrote.
A mild example, from the perspective of Mirek, a protagonist of "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting": "For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake."
A more severe example, from the perspective of Ludvik, the protagonist of Kundera's first novel, "The Joke": "The management of a woman's mind has its own inexorable rules; anyone who decides to persuade a woman or to refute her point of view with rational arguments is hardly likely to get anywhere. It is much wiser to grasp her basic self-image (her basic principles, ideals, convictions) and contrive to establish (with the aid of sophistry, illogical demagoguery, and the like) a harmonious relation between that self-image and the desired conduct on her part." A man who wants something from a woman "must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions."
Misogyny, or marketing strategy? The key is to be able to spot the former in the latter.
Our would-be censors always claim that their mission is protective. When a book-banning campaign comes from the right, it's about protecting the innocence of children; that innocence, for Kundera, is something exaggerated by adults who need a place to hang their sentimentality and nostalgia. For Kundera, the real innocence of children comes from their lack of memories; and people deprived of memories become children.
When progressive mobs cry "cancel," it's usually about protecting the feelings--and imagined sentimentalized innocence--of vulnerable people bearing marginalized identities. Rarely are the people in question asked what they would like to read.
I cannot write that Kundera offers plenty to offend left and right without repeating his claim, from "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," that "to define one or the other by means of the theoretical principles it professes is all but impossible. And no wonder: political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch." In other words, tell him your party affiliation and he'll tell you what tropes you like to sentimentalize.
Kundera offers the reader explicit and rather strange episodes of sex outside of marriage, without condemnation or moral consequence, and unkind assessments of the inner lives and motivations of his female characters. When I read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" in the summer of 1996, alongside "Lolita," I was legally a child and otherwise in transition, so to speak, to that curious state of being called womanhood.
Should I have been protected from the work of Kundera or Nabokov? Good Lord, no! Forewarned is forearmed. Kundera and Nabokov, in their uninhibited imaginings, did far more than any feminist consciousness-raising session to protect me from predatory men, stifling gender roles, and general disappointment. God bless both writers and the clerks at WordsWorth Books who could sell me their novels without fear of prosecution.
...
In "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Franz and Sabina visit a restaurant where "loud music with a heavy beat" pours from a speaker. Sabina notes the vicious cycle: "People are going deaf because the music is played louder and louder. But because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still." Franz asks Sabina, "Don't you like music?" and she replies no. But she thinks of the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, "when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence."
The people who seek to limit what we read, write, and speak should all bear the epithet of "censor," and the forces that intrude upon our quiet should be met with all the resistance that we can muster. Our quiet conversations--with ourselves, with others, with the past--are the place where we craft our responses to the changes that recent history has inflicted upon us; in our quiet conversations, we can break down the dulling residue of generic diagnoses and reassert our humanity.
We do not live under a totalitarian regime. We are free to refuse mass culture. We can resist.