Achy Breaky Hearts

National Review, July 20, 1998

Nobody wants to get a report telling him that he has cancer. My father certainly did not. But, as his secretary tells it, his only response as he read the note from his pathologist was a muttered "Well, well, well." One radical prostatectomy later, he should, with a bit of luck, survive for many years. But reactions as calm as his may not. Understatement, not making a fuss, is a vanishing virtue. Our culture, allegedly, respects it; Rose, the heroine of Titanic, picks up her life after the ship goes down. She does not mention Jack, the love she has lost, for the next 86 years. This is portrayed as a good thing. But it is a false tribute, a polite compliment to a god in which people no longer believe. Understatement is passé, perceived as a musty, rather masculine quality that is no longer quite relevant.

Even the Republicans have realized this. Their 1996 Convention was a lugubrious, weeping procession, designed to mask the fact that the GOP had gone to the old school for its candidate. The American people were not fooled. They wanted their mush, and they wanted it convincing. And so they rejected a laconic war veteran in favor of a President capable of choking up over the life and hard times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Or at least faking it, secure in the knowledge that there were votes to be won from such an embarrassing display.

The Stoics would have been disgusted. Wise old Greeks, they understood that there was no emotion that cannot usefully be repressed. It was a philosophy that elevated calm rationality and an acceptance of the misfortunes that life may bring. It was a point of view that was to linger. It had to. As successive generations were quick to realize, life could be "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

And they dealt with it. Stoicism was a habit, not a philosophy. In a world where disease, childbirth, and war conspired to keep life expectancies short, there was no time for therapy. Whining would not work; grim determination just might. To be sure, religious belief provided some support, a mechanism for accepting the savage unpredictability of existence. As a popular nineteenth-century tombstone epitaph for a child explained, "The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.'' Especially since, it was widely believed, he offered the righteous the prospect of a sweeter hereafter. Notions of immortality made suffering in this life much easier to bear.

So did the force of example. We liked our heroes tough. The English general Lord Uxbridge was unfortunate enough to lose a leg at Waterloo. He did not, however, lose his sense of humor, noting within a few minutes of the amputation that he had enjoyed "a pretty long run. I have been a beau these 47 years." It was time, he said, to give younger men a chance. The leg received a decent burial. As for Lord Uxbridge, he returned to the scene some wars later and insisted on dining at the table where he had lain as his leg was sawed off.

What he never did was write a book about the problems of the differently abled. To be sure, his stoicism was praised at the time, but it was also, to a degree we find unimaginable today, expected. As an ideal, at least, acceptance of adversity was something to be aimed for, part of a series of interlocking obligations that made an often hard life bearable. People did not want to feel each other's pain. They had quite enough of their own.

And yet they coped—grumbling, certainly, but moving on with their lives. Which, over time, got better, and as they did old attitudes began to fade. Science smoothed out life's rough edges, but what was left, paradoxically, became harder to bear. We defined disaster down, leaving each succeeding generation to mutter that the young do not know how lucky they are.

That may not have been immediately apparent in 1914. The soldiers in the trenches during the First World War persevered under appalling conditions, but when they followed their officers over the top, their stoicism died with them. The soldier's stolid acceptance of adversity came to be seen not as his ally, but rather as an accomplice in his destruction. Stoicism was a mug's game, evidence only of a deadened sensibility. It was a quality enjoyed only by men who had ceased to care for themselves.

This view had been anticipated by Freud. Even before the Great War his bizarre tales of trauma and repression had been finding an audience. For the first time, technology had created a society where a large number of people had time on their hands. And they were using that time to worry. Freud played on this anxiety, and his ideas spread rapidly in a culture that was too shattered by Passchendaele and the Somme to argue back.

Particularly against something so seductive as psychoanalysis. It was so easy. Suffering in silence no longer made any sense. Moaning could be medicine, a ''talking cure" that worked. Dignity died on the psychiatrist's couch and self-control was caricatured and turned into a vice. Look at the couple glaring out of Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930). Thin-tipped and somewhat intimidating, these ordinary Midwesterners (the artist's sister and a local dentist) have been transformed into icons of repression.

Well, they may not have been the Waltons, but they, and others like them, were probably doing their best. And, often, their descendants still do. From time to time we see them on CNN, piling sandbags on the levee as flood waters rise somewhere in the Dakotas, or rebuilding a small town after yet another Texas tornado.

These stories are breaking news, but they have the feel of a rerun, a Capra movie perhaps, shot in black and white, the echo of an older, wiser America. Traditional resilience is a quiet story, ill suited to an age that colorizes its dramas. So we rewrite the script, twisting the language of stoicism to describe something entirely different.

The bedraggled individuals on daytime TV may be encouraged to proclaim themselves "survivors" (normally of some graphically described form of "abuse"), but the tough talk is an illusion. Encouraged by our culture of therapy, these "survivors" have turned their troubles into theater, a ludicrous soap opera with themselves as the stars and us as an all too appreciative audience, our voyeurism justified as part of the "healing process." They have not overcome their trauma. They have embraced it and let it define their existence. And we let it define ours, secure in the knowledge that we too will have our chance, that everyone can become a victim.

Even the real survivors. The night of the World Trade Center bombing, a New York television station showed a group of schoolchildren who had been stuck for an hour or so in one of the building's elevators. Trapped in the dark they may have been, but their teacher had kept their spirits up until rescue came. It was a sweet, brave story. The children seemed fine. They had gone through an adventure, not a trauma. And then the anchorwoman leaned forward, her face twisted into the mask of concern usually reserved for a famine in a faraway country. Would the children be receiving "counseling"? She already knew the answer. And so did I.

Well, well, well. Perhaps it is time for stoics to complain.