Five days ago a story came out on the companion piece to research on social networks and happiness, what I'll call "The Loneliness Project." I have been following the story, the spin and the reader comments with fascination. The story as originally printed seems to suggest that like an illness loneliness is contagious, and it takes a very short leap to reach the conclusion that one should avoid lonely people to avoid catching it. Many of the reader comments posted online are vitriolic in their insistence that the poster "has never been lonely a day in their life" accompanied by helpful comments that lonely people should stop wallowing and just get over it.
In many of the study summaries a sentence appears at some point with a variation on the theme that "this suggests that human connection is important and so are social networks." And yet the framing of the information (with subheads that resemble warnings for swine flu) shapes the response: shun, blame, and flee. I have not yet dug deeply enough to find responses from the pastoral community. But it does seem if we are statistically an overwhelmingly Christian Nation (83% based on the most recent polls) that someone would speak up for loving kindness. I am waiting for the Compassion Project, and wondering which community is monitoring itself for signs of willingness to talk to outcasts.
I had some trepidation when I started looking for happiness as an intentional daily practice, both in my artwork and the life of my mind. I was raised with a fierce, clear-eyed and self-congratulatory atheism by parents who had no patience with organized religion or its homilies. I was trained early to mistrust happy people, because well, the pessimists are always right, and only fools and Pollyannas smile on a regular basis when we all know theworldisgoingtohellinahandbasket. It seemed quite radical to confront this familial doctrine with its antonym: yes the optimists may be wrong, but they seem to be happy. I'd like some of that.
I did a series of drawings at one point called "Dialogue Between an Optimist and a Pessimist" in which I looked at the compensations of both world views.
It is deeply satisfying to go into the world with the intention to find beauty, to share it and to experience joy. And yet I also find that facing darkness, emptiness, that handbasket multiplying with its sorrows, is just as necessary, and it brings its own happiness. At the risk of being a homilist peddling tired truisms, I don't see how you can have one without the other. And I don't see how you can have a healthy society if you walk around only smiling and keeping your heart tucked in your back pocket for fear of being shunned.
Finally for artists and other purveyors of creatively arranged information there is the question of responsibility, for which I have no answer but only endless questions. You can take any battle scene and film it in lovely sepia tones and play Brahms as a sound track. You can read the news of the daily wars and clip out only the photos of the two Afghan children running in sunlight through the ruined city. I love that photo, so much so that I ordered a large print of it from AP wirephoto. You can hide the other photos in the wastebasket, and you can only watch SnoWhite and The Sound of Music, both favorites of mine. But I am not sure you can ever escape the more complex contagion of the Real. Anybody up for another viewing of Schindler's List?
