Post #69: Dread

3 Oct. 2023

Jordan Peterson takes issue, in his daunting Maps of Meaning, with the way fear has often been presented, as if it were something we learn from things going wrong. Not so, he insists: fear is our natural default response to uncertainty; what we learn is not to be afraid, but rather to be unafraid when circumstances and our experiences with them allow us to feel reasonably safe (pp. 56-57).

Freedom from fear is a great civilizational accomplishment, in other words, and one of the great horrors of animal life—much emphasized in the Buddhist cosmology but too often idealized away where civilized conditions make us lose sight of just how ruthless “nature red in tooth and claw” really is—consists in how they must spend most of their lives in fear. Granted, their acute and intermittent terrors are not aggravated, as ours are, by foresight and anticipation, as Hobbes described so aptly in his treatment of Prometheus in the Leviathan:

For as Prometheus (The Prudent Man) was bound to the Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where an eagle fed on his liver, devouring in the day as much as was repaired in the night: so that man who looks too far before him, in the care of future time, has his heart all day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamities; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.

Even so, the animal state remains far from enviable, especially when it ends, as it usually does, with being eaten alive by a predator higher up the food-chain.

The Petersonian turn also coincides with what Hobbes had to say about politics, but what has often been wished away, or softened beyond recognition, by more optimistic philosophies. Peace can never be taken for granted; it is the quick descent into anarchy and terror that is the natural state, not freedom from fear. What is more, even civilized conditions depend for their maintenance on the vigilant deployment of variegated scare-tactics in therapeutic doses to keep our more grasping and anarchic impulses in check. Where there is no power to overawe us into obedience, or where that power loses credibility, peace cannot last long.

But there is another, more paradoxical side to it. While civilization is what keeps us relatively safe and secure, thus taking the burden of inescapable fear off our shoulders, it is not external circumstances alone that allow us to learn fearlessness. The more successful we become at controlling our environment, natural as well as social, the more local breakdowns will weigh on us, and be they ever so minor by historical (or worse, pre-historical) standards. It is not enough for life to become objectively safer and more secure, as it has been doing to a remarkable extent; it must also be perceived that way subjectively, which is quite another matter altogether.

Benign environments are to be cherished: they are the fruits of great human effort, the bequest to us by so many toiling, bleeding generations that have preceded us. Alas, highly civilized conditions may also contribute, ironically, to weakening our root resources for keeping anxiety in check—undermining, as they may well do, the confirmed confidence in our own ability to face the unknown, to bear up under our inner burdens, and to explore an ever-dangerous outer world with real courage, which is not the absence of fear, but the acquired strength to act in view of and despite our trepidations.

What, then, of dread, in times when the forces of civilization have gotten, on the whole, remarkably effective at preventing lapses into anarchy and physical danger? Is it perhaps no longer relevant? Hardly. For we do not dread only this or that concrete threat or danger, but anything we cannot control and make reliably safe. Let prevailing social conditions become ever so benign, we would still be unable to escape the dominion of Ageing, Sickness, and Death, as the Buddha taught so insistently. It is true that we can put off the hour of reckoning for a remarkably long time in many cases, and shut our eyes, for the most part, to the coming evils; but we cannot always do so, and when we have to confront the inevitable at last, we may find our dreads redoubled owing to our very success in banishing our native banes from view before.

The Buddha’s hair-raising Simile of the Mountain (Samyutta Nikaya 3:25 (5)) captures vividly the terrors we must all face eventually: Ageing, Sickness, and Death are likened to massive mountain ranges closing in relentlessly from all sides and crushing all living beings in their way. Nor is it just the violence that is so dread-inducing, though we should be under no illusions about what it takes to beat into final submission bodies built for staying alive at almost all cost. (If you think ageing is not violent, take a good look at a nude photo of a centenarian online.) And as for sickness, we all know enough of its lesser forms to dread with cause the more serious ones.

Still it is not this violence alone that is so scary, but rather the uncertainty surrounding it. Morrie (of the famous Tuesdays) marveled, on his deathbed, at how, when he used to have a cold, he would feel as if he were dying, while now that he really was dying, he felt as if he merely had a cold. Mind you, the odds that death will bring us not further agonies, but relief at last from life’s toils and troubles, are pretty good; only such probabilities do little to reassure us, because we do not, cannot know for sure, even if the occasional reports we receive back from the twilight zone are generally more reassuring than alarming. Ageing, too, is something that we cannot be properly prepared for since we’ve not had a chance to do it before; it may not turn out as bad as we fear, but we imagine it in such grim colors for a reason. Woody Allen quipped how much better it would be to live our lives the other way around, starting old and weak, getting younger with every day, and ending life as an orgasm. It’s a fun thought, but the seasoned perspective it would give us on events as they unfold is precisely what we have to do without by the very nature of things. And thus our sheer lack of experience and familiarity with what comes next is a good part of what triggers our natural disposition to dread, whatever blessings or curses may in fact lie ahead.

What does the Dhamma add to any of this? What solace does it offer, and what resources does it put at our disposal? Well, what it will do for us if we allow it and cultivate the practice, is to develop a different relationship to impermanence, and to the self that we feel so powerless to protect whenever dread sets in. For at bottom, what causes us such anxiety and distress, in addition to the uncertainty, is the feeling of helplessness in the face of grave menaces altogether beyond our means of coping, or so we imagine. That the fortifications of faith can augment our inner resources immensely is no secret; but there is equally great power in getting truly accustomed to viewing our own experiences as a passing stream, not something to be defended at all cost, a hopeless undertaking. Fear may keep raising its thousand heads, but with practice their frightful grimaces should become easier to observe, alongside our other miseries, without feeding them unduly; and thus, with time, the stirrings of dread should lose at least some of their excruciating sting. It may begin with no more than a few small buds of enhanced awareness around the brambles and the thorns of life; but eventually the seeds of equanimity too will sprout, make their way through the surrounding muck, then flower and bear fruit—the lotus on the cross of our condition, one might say.

As always, I must qualify my hopeful musings with the caveat that the springs of dread, like those of attachment, run very deep indeed; such primal habits cannot be simply switched off at will, they must be slowly reconfigured, step by tiny step, all the days of one’s life. I cannot pretend that when it comes to my own dread at the prospect of ageing, sickness, and death, I’ve been very successful, so far, with putting my mind at peace. As the horror is coming more and more vividly into view, I am tempted to say that it freaks me out as much as ever; but perhaps that is not quite true. Had I been thus exposed to it, up close, when younger, I would have been even more scared, and the change, however slight, is not I think a matter of maturation alone. What is more, I have gained at least a sense of the direction in which relief and solace is to be sought, whether I can reach there or not. It is not all or nothing, but a matter of increments; even tiny changes, when it comes to such fundamentals, can add up impressively over time, as I keep repeating, for my own reassurance as much as for anyone else’s.

So no, I cannot say that I am ready to be old, to fall gravely ill, or to take my leave of life. What I see when I look ahead, chimerical or real, still fills me with ample dread. But I can bear to look ahead now, at least, rather than burying my head in the sand, and I have a sense what I need to keep doing if I want the prospect to become more tolerable. I’ve known all along—indeed it was this concern above all else that made me take up my practice—that everything would come down to a race with time: what will give first, the tenuous thread of life, or my ever so entrenched creaturely habits? I have no idea what the answer will turn out to be, when the dreaded day comes. Until things fall apart, I too will probably keep busying myself with what ordinary worldlings do in vain hopes of silencing the tolling of the bells; but I also expect to keep augmenting, along the way, my sidelines in more radical strategies, feeble as my efforts in that direction may often seem.

What are a few thousand hours on such a long Path, a hardened meditator might scoff (see Post #2). They are a start, I would answer, and maybe a little more than that. Possibly quite a bit more. We shall see.

(This one goes to Matthew.)