The Meursault Syndrome

Frustrated over a student who was bewildered on account of her bad grade and even more bewildered upon being told it was because she hadn’t read the text or taken notes in class, a colleague of mine in sociology remarked, “These kids don’t even understand process.”  That was in 1972, and it looks to me as if the phenomenon is a good deal more prominent now.  For that matter, back in 1927 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (now almost forgotten because he was overly conservative) predicted that succeeding generations would enjoy the benefits of a liberal democracy without taking into account what it had cost their forebears.  Ortega said they would take it for granted that the benefits of democracy were theirs in the course of nature.  Ominously, this was nine years before the unspeakable horrors of the Spanish civil war.

He was right.  This postmodern generation tends to reject history in general, and is thereby in danger of fulfilling the prophecy of Will Durant:  “Those who do not know history are forever condemned to repeat it.” History is written by the winners, we’re told, and the implication is that it is therefore invalid.

Colombian author Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal once said, “History is written by the winners.  We losers write poetry.”  Shortly thereafter he was thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge and barely escaped with his life.  I’m anxious to see how the winners, i.e., the Colombian oligarchy, write that up, and what his “poetry” on the issue looks like.

So for this generation the lessons of the past are not lessons at all.  As a San Francisco high school instructor put it, “We don’t teach facts.  We teach concepts.”  The problem is that in such a case any idea of the past whatsoever is as good as any other.  A mind-boggling case in point is that of a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara who remarked to my hypocrisy.com colleague Richard Cochrane that he was going to vote for Obama because he could be counted on to change the policies that caused us to drop atomic bombs on Japan so Japan had to retaliate by bombing Pearl Harbor.  These, he said, were the same policies that led England to invade Germany and cause World War II to break out in Europe.

Well, at least the chowderhead believes in cause and effect.  Just has it backwards is all, but you can’t expect too much these days.  Many in his generation have lost touch with that esoteric concept.  (Why doesn’t someone put billiards in the curriculum?)  Also in Santa Barbara, I noticed a large banner in a private school that read, “Actions have consequences.”  What a novel concept to teach the kids!  Living in the South as I now do, I marvel at the number of people, and mostly people who can’t afford it, who smoke.  The facts are out there:  cause, smoking; effect, early death.  But facts don’t have much impact on this generation.  As another professor put it, there are no facts.  There are only opinions.  That goes for process and cause and effect as well, one presumes.

Perhaps this is why a writer in the Atlantic a few years ago introduced the term “apocalyptic nihilism” to the magazine’s readers.  He had heard it voiced by social workers dealing with a rash of senseless teenage killings in Vermont around that time.  The kids said they were murdering people just to get their names in the news.  They felt that the world has no future, and therefore they have no future, so why not at least attract some attention?

We’re getting chillingly close to the attitude of Albert Camus’s protagonist, Meursault, in The Stranger.  Meursault sees no continuity, no process, no cause and effect in one’s acts.  He makes love to the same woman once a week, but is mystified by the question whether he loves her.  He is equally bewildered when people are offended by his lack of emotion at his mother’s wake.  Finally he kills a man in cold blood on a beach, and when he is put on trial he has no idea why.  But then, a couple of decades later, Thomas Pynchon’s narrator in Gravity’s Rainbow deals with the case of the classic paranoiac, who feels everything is connected and organized with regard to him- or herself.  Then he offers, “There is . . . also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”

I’m not so sure.  In this election campaign it looks as if millions are in love with one image or another, without considering what the real issues might be, which means a lack of consideration for the effects that might follow the cause of electing only an image.  Both presidential candidates are promising change, but that’s just a bit hypocritical.  It’s a little like saying, “I promise that if you drink Liquid Plum’r you’ll get a real flavor sensation.”  In either case you just might not like it.

Me?  When I’m watching the World Series on television and a manager goes out to confer with his pitcher and catcher I’m afraid they’re talking about me.