A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack

Three. The Renaissance of Lack

65 Three The Renaissance of Lack If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken, as James Joyce’s Daedalus put it, what gives that nightmare its power over us? Perhaps it began as a daydream more attractive than the pain of being human—until the dream took on a life of its own and we became trapped in our own objectifications.Then the key to this puzzle is why we prefer daydreaming to waking up, and that brings us back to lack. If the autonomy of self-consciousness is a delusion that can never quite shake off its shadow feeling that “something is wrong with me,” it will need to rationalize that sense of inadequacy somehow. Without a religious means of absolution, today we usually experience our lack as “I don’t yet have enough of . . .” Most of us have lost faith in collective solutions, so we are more in the grip of individualistic ones, such as the craving for fame, the love of romantic love, and of course an obsession with money. This chapter challenges the supposed secularity of modern individualism by arguing that these three may be understood as historically conditioned forms of delusive craving that gained their power over us because today they have become our main attempts to resolve such lack. These inclinations are not limited to any particular time or place, of course, but they began to gain special importance when Christianity began to decline in the late Middle Ages. As long as there was a truly catholic church providing a socially agreed upon means to cope with lack, such projects did not 66 A Buddhist History of the West seem spiritually necessary. Jacob Burckhardt, Johann Huizinga, and Philippe Aries all noticed a striking increase in preoccupation with death at the end of the medieval era. In psychotherapeutic terms, such an increase in death anxiety requires stronger psychic devices to cope with it. In lack terms, the greater sense-of-self that began to develop then must have been shadowed by a greater sense of lack, leading to greater individual need to realize this self and more radical attempts to do so. If we do not presuppose the usual distinction between secular and sacred, we can see the same drive operating in each case: the conscious or unconscious urge to resolve our sense of lack, by becoming real. To the extent that these three are motivated by such a spiritual need, they may be considered something like secular heresies. Since they cannot fulfill that need, they tend to spin out of control and become demonic. The secular/sacred dualism seems important to us because we are wary of materialistic and psychologistic reductionism, yet there is another way to understand their nonduality. Rather than reducing the sacred to a function of the material, this chapter turns that idea on its head by suggesting that our modern worldly values (desire for fame, money, etc.) acquire their compulsiveness from a misdirected spiritual drive. THE FEVER OF RENOWN1 Because the public image comes to stand as the only valid certification of being, the celebrity clings to his image as the rich man clings to his money—that is, as if to life itself. (Lapham 230) “How can he be dead, who lives immortal in the hearts of men?” mused Longfellow, bestowing on Michelangelo our highest possible praise.“If his inmost heart could have been lain open,” wrote Hawthorne of a character in Fanshawe, “there would have been discovered the dream of undying fame; which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.” More powerful, because of such a dream is our reality woven, and the nature of this dream ensures that there is no lack of historical testimony to its power. Unfortunately, seeing through one aspect of this delusion does not immunize us against others. Horace warned that the race for public honors traps men, for the urge to glory and praise ruins both wellborn and lowly:“those who seek much, lack much.” But this did not stop him from crowing at the end of his third ode: “I have wrought a monument more enduring than bronze, and The Renaissance of Lack 67 loftier than the royal accumulation of the pyramids. Neither corrosive rain nor raging wind can destroy it, nor the innumerable sequence of years nor the flight of time. I shall not altogether die.”Was Horace more vain...