The Glue Is Gone

""AM E RICAN SCHOLAR The Glue Is Gone The things that held us together as individuals and as a people are being lost. Can we find them again? EDWARD HOAGLAND T^,here's a flutter to society now, a tremulous ness: young people I studying yoga therapy after college instead of essaying graduate M school, and their parents taking cooking very seriously, with Humniei^ in the suhurhs but debt a major household topic, and several grand- mothers I know unexpectedly becoming "primary caregivers" because of a divorce. The presidency seems to have gone quite slapstick, with another Texan mocking the two seaboards with an ill-considered, long-term foreign war Yet our brains' functional areas, our pharmaceutical needs and desires, in fact our genome itself, all seem to have been mapped. We look scientifi- cally as well as affectionately at children, we think we know so much about their stages of development {about our need for them, as well). From day care to an eventual hospice, their every twitch has been accounted for. Yet we don't know why we are widely hated so, when America was created to be imitated and loved. Now we sometimes have to force people to love us—send in the SFLAJj. Our democracy, at the moment, requires other coun- tries not to be democracies to service us with Saudi Arabian or Nigerian oil, "^^ Edward Hoagland has published nineteen books and lives in Vermont. 19 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR sweatshop textiles, and electronic parts. We want authoritarian govern- ments to preside over our suppliers, although incongruously we feel as- tonished at the phenomenon of "asymmetric warfare" by "those who hate our way of life." I once met a SEAL whose mother used to spit on the floor and make him lick it up, when he was small. Thus he became enthusiastic in his twenties about a career of going in for regime change. My graduat- ing college students don't do that, but face a tougher vocational start than my own class did half a century ago. At our recent reunion, almost every- one who had functioned in a profession was glad to have practiced it when he did, notjust because we were now grumpy old men but becavise the link- ages have been dissolving in law, medicine, accounting, and so on, the ethics that, however imperfectly, have served as glue. But death is easier, verging on the casual when we "go," with less of a mys- terious or religious fulcrum to launch us up or down. It pinches when another friend departs, but his pain factor was well controlled and we don't think of him arraigned at St. Peter's Gate for a summation, and have a starkly shrinking assemblage of relatives that we acknowledge ourselves as kin to. More stratified by age and class, we're tethered to our beepers and screened e-mail instead. One hears a man with a cell phone talk first to his mistress, fobbing her off for another night, then to his wife, while finger- ing a loose pill from his breast pocket and swallowing it dry, screwing up his face at the bad taste. People had mistresses before, but didn't want such intimacies overheard: whereas, in this jam-packed, jittery world, who will you run into again? We learn to skitter underneath the radar nearly everywhere, in evading rush-hour highway jams or airport security shakedowns, tax audits, or a siege of downsizing or insurance cancellations. Being alert to the conven- iences of anonymity, we want the camera's eye to sweep over us without pausing, and the computer, if we're juggling plastic. We want our nvimbers to be in order—Social Security, passport. Zip and PIN, area code, driver's li- cense, E-ZPass. Our divorce or retirement papers may be in a safe-deposit box, but otherwise most people trust in a backtip hard drive somewhere to record their bank balance, etc., knowing hunger is for other continents. God's imprimatur has been upon us. Yet we do sense that seismic changes will be necessaiy to address the jumhled emergencies arising unpredictably, from watering the city of Phoenix to salvaging Africa. We can map every yard of the Earth from space, telephone from moving cars, melt the shelves of Antarctica, sock a cancer radiologically, and get a hard-on from a pill. But it's all pell-mell, novelty as an addiction. Normalit)' implies a permanence that people doubt, although their unease may be subterranean and perhaps they find the Lord on Sundays and tidy up. How long does it last? What happens next? People of retirement age may be relieved to be able to indulge a taste not only for laziness, but also for moral clarity. Now that they are spectators, they feel like themselves. I have 20 A street scene in lower Manhattan October 2001 a friend, a financial analyst who was on the seventy-something floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center when it was struck on 9/11, and he survived simply by descending the stairs relentlessly, regardless of smoke, heat, debris, counter-instructions, and cries for help—hundreds of cries for help. As a black person, he found the experience not so different from the rest of his life. Having scrambled to that level of prosperity from the ghetto he'd grown up in, he had been ignoring cries for help from many direc- tions for many, many years. Hardball versus team play, agility versus duty, these contrasts jerk in constant tension in entrepreneurialism. But we feel even less ambiguity about our self-interest now that we are so mobile. We wonder what on earth to do. Conscience doesn't register, especially, but what is in our self- interest? Our democracy has overripened to the point where politicians poll us before they speak tbeir minds, which creates no leaps of inspiration, but instead a circle of confusion. Agility isn't buoyancy, doesn't make us happy. This reliance on the common wsdom puts the cart before the horse because of course the theory was not that the people might somehow for- mulate enlightened national policies—rather that collectively, intuitively, they could best fathom who ought to be entrusted to do so. Our responses are turning generic, too. When I see a bicyclist on the road, I'll swing a bit wider than I need to for safety's sake, not knowing who the person is but because I'm sympathetic in general to bicyclists, don't want them to feel bullied by the traffic. In general is how we tend to oper- ate, in other words; in the plural, less and less in the presence of each other THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR as flesh and blood because so much of our gabbing is done by keyboard or conversations bounced up to a satellite and back. This means we don't judge people by the honestyof their handshake or their visage anjmore (Oi^well's yardstick was that anybody at age fifty bad earned the face he wore), or even a lifetime's reputation for integrity or its opposite, since we rarely sbake hands or deal repeatedly for years with tbe same people now. We are zoned for housing, schooling, occupation, and so on, in hordes of interest groups, with friendship like a magic-lantern show—this one, that one hopscotching to another job on the geographic checkerboard. Nor is body language tbe lingua franca that it used to be. Like facial expressions, such subtleties may become vestigial, because of e-mail and what not, and go the way of the Most of us have enough dodo bird. Nature doesn't squander commLon sense to know energy on superfluous methods of there is some kind of God communication. because loy wells in us per- ^"""S ^"^ transition toward more 1 1 1 . 1 , wooden faces, however, our cities' naps analogously to photo- . , * i_ • * 1 Tn. streets are sometimes mcongruously synthesis m plants, lhe transformed by domestic theater, with question is His location: frowns of empathy or loverly exas- inside, outdoors, in hu- peration—intimate, openhearted ex- man guise, or every moist, pressions—walking toward us on the svnaptic charge? sidewalk, not brusque at all, but in- ward, the feet ofthe person slowing as if in the kitchen or a bedroom, while be or she confides with a delicate succession of smiles into the cell phone. People are still used to tbe privacy of wired telephoning, and perhaps a world where you speak mosdy face to face, still free to touch and kiss or poke and glare, and the voice, not deracinated by talking into ubiquitous answering ma- chines, reverberates with a nuance of emotion the way that tbe eyes do. Will our voices, as well, shed spontaneity: the huskiness that betrays the tears on a friend's face across a thousand miles of phone lines and makes you auto- matically begin to mime your distress? We're circling our wagons in private as well as public life—unilateralist in our gym regimens and quirky diets, in choosing pets as close compan- ions, or soft pornography and bulky cars. Yet such a circle may add up to a zero, so that although church attendance is down, people shop around for a credo to believe in: notjust Adam Smith's atavism or New Age narcissism, but an idealism marbled with faith and logic, and a limber minister to explain the details. Although I don't regard myself as dilettantish or unusually dis- oriented, within the past year I have received a Christmas communion wafer from Milan's cardinal in bis duomo and held bands in a circle of Quakers in a library basement in Vermont.

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