The agony of the human condition

So necessary has denial of the issue of the human condition been that it is only when moved to extreme profundity that humans have acknowledged this underlying insecurity about whether they are at base good or evil beings. There have been innumerable books written about humans’ capacity for good and evil, but what will become clear as you read on is that very, very few people have been able to face down and grapple with the core issue of what it really is to be human; actually confront the dilemma of the human condition. The following few examples constitute almost the entire collection of such profound moments that I have found in the 27 years since 1975, when I first started to actively write about the human condition. (The handful of examples that are not included here, particularly examples from the writings of Olive Schreiner and Albert Camus, are mentioned elsewhere in this book.) The rarity of examples indicate just how difficult a subject the human condition has been for the human mind to approach. You will notice that it required the capabilities of Page 28 of
Print Edition some of the world’s most gifted writers to manage even to allude to the subject.

In 1988 Time magazine invited Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, to write an essay about apartheid in South Africa. He instead provided a deeply reflective piece about some of his favourite pieces of literature. In the essay, which turned out to be the great writer’s last written work, he said: ‘I would like to have written one of the greatest poems in the English language—William Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright”, with that verse that asks in the simplest words the question which has troubled the mind of man—both believing and non believing man—for centuries: “When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears / Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the lamb make thee?”’ (Time mag. 25 Apr. 1988). Blake’s poem poses the age-old riddle and fundamental question involved in being human: how could the mean, cruel, indifferent and aggressive ‘dark side’ of human nature—represented by the metaphor of the ‘Tiger’—be consistent and reconcilable with, and derivative of, the same force that created the lamb in all its innocence? It is the line, ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ that, if you allow yourself to dwell on it, is so disturbing. In this essay, the culmination of a lifetime of thoughtful expression, Paton finally brings his focus to bear on this line, a few words that take the reader into the realm where there resides the deep fear about what it really is to be human, about the core issue—that one day had to be addressed and solved—of are humans evil, worthless, meaningless beings, or aren’t they? The opening lines of Blake’s poem ‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night’, refer to humans’ denial of the issue of their divisive condition. It is a subject humans consciously repress but it is an issue that ‘burns bright’ in the ‘forests of the night’ of their deepest thoughts. As Paton pointed out, despite humans’ denial of it, the great, fundamental, underlying question has always been, are humans part of God’s ‘work’, part of his purpose and design, or aren’t they?

In the following quote the poet Alexander Pope considers wisdom to be the ultimate ‘system’ because it can make all things understandable or ‘coherent’. Like Paton and Blake, he believed that ‘in the scale of the reasoning’ involved in becoming wise, the ultimate ‘question’ to be answered (the one the human mind has ‘wrangled’ or struggled with for ‘so long’) is this question of whether or not humans are a mistake. In his renowned 1733 work, Essay on Man, Pope wrote: ‘Of systems possible, if ’tis confess’d / That Wisdom infinite must form the best / Page 29 of
Print Edition Where all must fall, or not coherent be / And all that rises, rise in due degree / Then in the scale of reas’ning life, ’tis plain / There must be, somewhere, such a rank as man: / And all the question (wrangle e’er so long) / Is only this, if God has placed him wrong?’

In his distillation of a lifetime of mentally grappling with what it is to be human, Australia’s only literary Nobel laureate, Patrick White, also gave a rare, honest description of the core agony in human life of having to live with this unresolved question. The following is the key passage from White’s 1981 autobiography, Flaws in the Glass: ‘What do I believe? I’m accused of not making it explicit. How to be explicit about a grandeur too overwhelming to express, a daily wrestling match with an opponent whose limbs never become material, a struggle from which the sweat and blood are scattered on the pages of anything the serious writer writes? A belief contained less in what is said than in the silences. In patterns on water. A gust of wind. A flower opening. I hesitate to add a child, because a child can grow into a monster, a destroyer. Am I a destroyer? this face in the glass which has spent a lifetime searching for what it believes, but can never prove to be, the truth. A face consumed by wondering whether truth can be the worst destroyer of all’ (p.70 of 260).

What is so brave about what Patrick White has written is that he has managed to put down on paper the core fear he is living with. If you allow yourself to think deeply about what it is that White is daring to articulate you will see that it is a terrifying issue that he is facing. Gradually, as this book unfolds, the full horror of the issue of the human condition, and the enormous difficulty humans have had trying to plumb the depths where the issue resides, will become clear. The essay in this book titled Resignation will especially bring home how difficult, indeed impossible, it has been for humans to confront the issue of the meaningfulness or otherwise of the dark side of themselves and our species. The reader will be brought into full contact with the issue of the human condition and see that we have indeed been a ‘God-fearing’ species, a species in denial, with only a handful of people in recorded history able to confront the ideals or God, face to face. It will become clear that the denial and its evasion permeates every aspect of human life. Even science, which is supposed to be a rigorously objective discipline, free of personal bias, is full of subjective evasion, saturated with the denial.

Sharing the same sentiments and even using the same imagery as Patrick White, William Wordsworth wrote of the agony of the dilemma of the human condition in his celebrated 1807 poem, Intimations of Page 30 of
Print Edition Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. With extraordinary honesty, Wordsworth recalled all the beauty in the world that humans were able to access before ‘the fall’; before the human species departed from the fabled state of harmony and enthralment in which it lived prior to the emergence of the alienating state of the human condition. He ended the poem by alluding to the reason for humans’ loss of innocence and sensitivity, adding, ‘The Clouds that gather round the setting sun / Do take a sober colouring from an eye / That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality / …To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ The emergence of the human condition made humans red-eyed from being worried—or ‘troubled’ as Paton said—about their life’s value, meaning and worth. Wordsworth is saying that worrying about our mortality is ultimately due to being insecure about our life’s value and worth—hence the reference in the poem’s title to the ‘intimations of immortality’ humans had during our species’ pristine, uncorrupted ‘early childhood’. The thoughts that are now buried so deep that they are beyond the reach of humans’ everyday emotional selves—they are ‘too deep for tears’—are the thoughts about humans’ present corrupted state that the beauty of even the plainest flower has the ability to remind humans of, if they let it; if they have not practiced burying the issue deeply enough.

Morris West is another distinguished Australian writer. The author of 26 novels, including The Shoes of the Fisherman, he has been described as one of the 20th century’s most popular novelists. Many times he was asked to write the story of his life and declined, until in 1996, at the age of 80, he reviewed the chronicle of his life and belief in A View from the Ridge—the testimony of a pilgrim. In this book he confided: ‘Evil, you see, is not explainable. It is not even understandable. It is what the writers of the Dutch Catechism called “the great absurdity, the great irrelevancy”…brutalise a child and you create a casualty or a criminal. Bribe a servant of the state and you will soon hear the deathwatch beetles chewing away at the rooftrees of society. The disease of evil is pandemic; it spares no individual, no society, because all are predisposed to it. It is this predisposition which is the root of the mystery. I cannot blame a Satan, a Lucifer, a Mephistopheles, for the evils I have committed, the consequences of which have infected other people’s lives. I know, as certainly as I know anything, that the roots are in myself, buried deeper than I care to delve, in caverns so dark that I fear to explore them. I know that, given the circumstances and the provocation, I could commit any crime in the Page 31 of
Print Edition calendar’ (p.78 of 143). It is the ‘caverns so dark’ that are going to be explored in this book, and, despite what Morris West has said, evil will be explained, it will be made understandable.

As Alan Paton, William Blake, Alexander Pope, Patrick White, William Wordsworth and Morris West bravely express, it took virtually all humans’ courage merely to exist under the duress of the human condition. Having no answer to this core question in human life—of humans’ meaningfulness or otherwise, of are humans part of God’s ‘work’ or aren’t they—meant that trying to think about the problem led only to deep depression. As Australian comedian Rod Quantock once commented, ‘Thinking can get you into terrible downwards spirals of doubt’ (Sayings of the Week, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 1986).

Another renowned Australian literary figure, Henry Lawson—whom Ernest Hemingway greatly admired, and whose work he referred to in his 1970 book Islands in the Stream—wrote extraordinarily forthrightly about the dangerous depression that awaits those who might try to confront the issue of the human condition. In his 1897 poem, The Voice from Over Yonder, Lawson wrote, ‘“Say it! think it, if you dare! / Have you ever thought or wondered / Why the Man and God were sundered? / Do you think the Maker blundered?” / And the voice in mocking accents, answered only: “I’ve been there.”’ Implicit in the final phrase ‘I’ve been there’ are the unsaid words ‘and I’m not going there again’. The ‘there’ and the ‘over yonder’ of the title is a reference to the state of depression that resulted from trying to confront the issue of the human condition—trying to understand ‘why the Man and God were sundered’, why humans lost their innocence, departed from the cooperative, loving, ideal state, ‘fell from grace’, became corrupted, ‘evil’, ‘sinful’. To avoid depression humans had no choice but to repress the issue of the human condition, block it out of their conscious awareness, and cease trying to decide whether ‘the Maker blundered’.

Alluding to the unconfrontable and horrifically depressing issue of the human condition, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about an underlying ‘despair’ in human life, and succinctly described the depression that results from that despair with the title of his 1849 book The Sickness Unto Death. In it he wrote, ‘there is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there does not dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something, or a something he doesn’t even dare strike up acquaintance with…he goes about with a sickness, goes Page 32 of
Print Edition about weighed down with a sickness of the spirit, which only now and then reveals its presence within, in glimpses, and with what is for him an inexplicable anxiety’ (tr. A. Hannay, 1989, p.52 of 179). Kierkegaard described the depression that is like a living death, which the ‘tormenting contradiction’ of the human condition has caused in humans, when he wrote that, ‘the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die…that despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction, this sickness in the self; eternally to die, to die and yet not to die’ (ibid. p.48).

In his 1931 book, The Destiny of Man, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev referred to Kierkegaard’s experience of deep depression when he described the ‘terror’ and ‘fear’ that trying to think about the tormenting contradiction of the human condition evokes in all but those with a ‘clear conscience’, those who are ‘prophetic’. Berdyaev says that while thinking about the human condition is terrifyingly depressing for most people—he refers to the ‘deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil’—he emphasised that only by thinking about it can real knowledge be found. Clearly if you are living in denial of a problem you are not in a position to solve it. Berdyaev wrote: ‘Knowledge requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror. Fear makes the search for truth and the knowledge of it impossible. Knowledge implies fearlessness…Conquest of fear is a spiritual cognitive act. This does not imply, of course, that the experience of fear is not lived through; on the contrary, it may be deeply felt, as was the case with Kierkegaard, for instance…it must also be said of knowledge that it is bitter, and there is no escaping that bitterness…Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. But the bitterness is due to the fallen state of the world, and in no way undermines the value of knowledge…it must be said that the very distinction between good and evil is a bitter distinction, the bitterest thing in the world…Moral knowledge is the most bitter and [requires] the most fearless of all for in it sin and evil are revealed to us along with the meaning and value of life. There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless. We cannot rest in the thought that that distinction is ultimate. The longing for God in the human heart springs from the fact that we cannot bear to be faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil and the bitterness of choice…Ethics must be both theoretical and practical, i.e. it must call for the moral reformation of life and a revaluation of values as well as for their acceptance. And this implies that ethics is bound to contain a prophetic element. It must be a revelation of a clear conscience, unclouded by social conventions; it must be a critique Page 33 of
Print Edition of pure conscience’ (tr. N. Duddington, 1960, pp.14–16 of 310).

This collection of quotes about the agony of the human condition shows how fearful humans have been of the issue. At the very end of his 1948 book Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton alluded to humanity’s dream of one day finding understanding of the human condition and by so doing free itself from this ‘bondage of fear’. He wrote: ‘But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.’

In truth, human self-esteem, which at base is the ability to defy the implication that they are not worthwhile beings, is so fragile that if a man loses his fortune in a stock market crash, or his reputation from some mistake he has made in the management of his life, he all-to-frequently will suicide or, if not suicide, then completely crumple as a person, lose the will to actively participate in life. The truth is that the limits within which humans feel secure and can operate are extremely narrow. Humans’ insecurity from the dilemma of the human condition has been such that their comfort zone is only a tiny part of the vast, true world that humans are capable of living in. As the full extent of humans’ insecurity under the duress of the human condition becomes clear it will become apparent that, in terms of the true potential of the universe, the world that humans have lived in has been merely a miserable, tiny, dark fortress of a corner. Humans’ psychological circumstances—which, at base, arise from their struggle with the human condition—are extremely fragile. Although they have had to live in denial of this truth to cope with it, the fact is humans are an immensely insecure species.