If you’re going to be purely rational about it, the truly virtuous attitude would be to put a hand on the poor schlemiel’s shoulder, buy him an all-you-can-eat breakfast, and explain how his faithful hope in the eventual charity of that roulette wheel is going to result in a trip to the pawnbroker and a long, smelly Greyhound ride back to Dubuque. In the words of the great twentieth-century theologian Kenny Rogers, “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Or, if we’re going to switch metaphors back to the Cubbies, I should have sat my boy down and said, “Son, I know we live in Chicago, but geography doesn’t have to be destiny. What are your feelings about pinstripes?”
If you’re going to be purely rational about it, then our sanctification of hope as a cardinal virtue is less due to S. T. Aquinas than to P. T. Barnum. Which means that we’d do better training ourselves to follow enlightened self-interest rather than the pie-in-the-sky dreams of pie salesmen. Because let’s face it, “Winners never quit and quitters never win” is a great motivational slogan—so long as you’re playing with house odds. And it makes a difference whether that house is Caesar’s Palace or Wrigley Field.
And yet. Having presented an analytical, rational case against it, we ought to at least consider whether this hope stuff has any redeeming product features. First, let’s accept that however thin the semantic line between hope and gullibility may be, there is one. After all, English—and nearly every other language—assigns separate words to these concepts. “Gullibility” has a closer kinship to stupidity. “Hope” is often defined as a negative space—that is, as the absence of, or the active resistance to, despair. And now we’re starting to get somewhere.
I wouldn’t call despair a vice, exactly. All of us are, in some respect, susceptible to it. It’s probably humankind’s default position, actually. Just about everyone can look at the hollow-cheeked screamer in the Edvard Munch painting and think, Been there, dude. But if despair isn’t a sin (except to Catholics; you know how they are), it’s probably best seen as a weakness—as an instinct that, like fear, is perfectly human and logical—but that doesn’t do us any favors in practical terms. If you get tossed in a pit with a rabid animal (or a Yankees fan) you have every reason to be afraid. But cowering in fear isn’t going to help you survive. You have to master your fear, distract the animal, and then figure out a way to escape. (I suggest confusing them with a riddle. For instance, ask if they think Derek Jeter is omnipotent, and when they say yes—they always do—ask if Derek Jeter could make a hot dog so big that even Derek Jeter couldn’t eat it. This should buy you a week or so.)
Hope involves the determination to transcend the crippling weakness of despair. Consider a lifeboat from a sunken ocean liner, adrift in the Pacific, with three survivors: a despairing pessimist, a hope-filled optimist, and yourself. The pessimist passes the time with constant reminders about the boat’s dwindling supplies and by giving pet names to the sharks circling below. The optimist starts paddling, in the hope that maybe—just maybe—you’ll catch a wave and be whisked away to an island paradise with movie starlets, hot Kansas farm girls, and a professor who can make shortwave radios from coconuts.
Now for the sake of argument, let’s say the pessimist doom-sayer was right all along and predicts with uncanny precision the exact day when all the food runs out. Now I can’t speak for you, but when that moment comes I’m voting to eat him. In the end, Mr. Gloomy Cassandra’s 100 percent accurate diagnoses may have bought him a brief moment of smug, triumphal I-told-you-so. But it gets followed by a few days as the featured dish on the lifeboat lunch menu. By contrast, no matter how wrong he turned out to be, Mr. Sunshine Pollyanna isn’t going die regretting his optimism. The pessimist was correct, but even by his own cynical standard—so what? What did it benefit him? From the most self-interested perspective, even under the worst possible outcome, hope is ultimately the logical choice.
And then there’s the other possibility: That the optimist turns out to be right. You make landfall and live out your days on a tropical paradise with Ginger on one arm and Mary Ann on the other. Either way, you’re better off throwing in your lot with hope.
But of course those are just the practical reasons to give in to hope. The more philosophical argument concerns hope’s ability to affect everyone aboard our shared cosmic lifeboat. Despair and hope are both contagious, perhaps equally so. If we are going to face a global attitudinal epidemic, better one of hopeful expectation than the alternative. Hope lays the foundation for the other virtues that advance humanity—courage, industry, exploration. And while hope may not be a plan, neither is despair. In fact, without hope, why bother with planning at all? Hope, or the lack thereof, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a society that assumes an inevitably bleak future is going to get exactly what it expects. Sustaining hope benefits not only you but everyone around you—even those hopeless, eye-rolling cynics who remain immune to your good cheer. Whether they like it or not.
It isn’t all puppy dogs and ice cream, mind you. Hope can, from time to time, leave people vulnerable to exploitation. Every good con artist, ad man, and political message consultant knows that “hope” has a boffo Q score. As always, caveat emptor. Here’s a good rule of thumb for you kids: If something is branded “HOPE,” then it’s probably a swindle. Remember, there is no inherent contradiction between being hopeful and being skeptical; it’s what separates hope from gullibility.
But just as a healthy bit of skepticism keeps hope from lapsing into gullibility, a healthy bit of hope keeps skepticism from lapsing into corrosive cynicism. Humankind is not neatly categorized with bright lines sectioning off the scheming grifters from the naive marks. You can’t always tell Lucy from Charlie Brown. But instead of being on the constant lookout for the sharpies, it’s probably best to recognize that the vast majority of this world is pretty much like you—good folks who just want things to turn out all right.
Which brings us back to the corner of Addison and Clark. I have to believe all the Cubs who’ve played there—from Kiki Kuyler and Phil Cavaretta, to Ernie Banks and Ron Santo, to Kerry Wood and Sammy Sosa—are as pained by the streak as I am. Even as they rake in all those millions in merchandise, TV, and beer revenue. I have to believe the Cubs front office wants to win the World Series every bit as much as I do. If only so the rest of the baseball world will leave us alone and start talking about the curse of the Cleveland Indians for a change. Hope may be a cardinal virtue, but it’s also a Cubs virtue.
So maybe the Cubs won’t win the World Series this year. Or next year. Maybe not in my dad’s lifetime, maybe not in my lifetime. But eventually they will. I know this for a fact, because when the odds are above zero, everything is inevitable. And when that day comes, I’ll raise the W flag from my celestial sky-box and buy a round of Old Styles for Grandpa and Dad and Uncle Arlen. And we’ll tell everybody who’ll listen: We told you, man—they were due.
CHAPTER 7
Charity
You Can’t Give This Stuff Away
Mollie Hemingway
THE INTERNET—stop me if you’ve heard this—is great for lots of things. Communication, wasting time, shopping, wasting time, research, wasting time, and finding pictures of cats getting into hilarious scrapes. (And also wasting time.) But one of the lesser-heralded features of the information superhighway—can you believe we used to call it that?—is the extent to which it has fostered and enabled charity. The ease of processing credit card payments online allows us to support charitable organizations anytime and anywhere. The advent of crowd-funding has allowed people to organize coordinated giving, leveraging the power of networks as a force multiplier. And then there’s the speed of the Internet, which either triggers our charitable impulses or devalues charity to the state of impulse purchase, depending on your view. Either way, the upshot is that people now become passionately committed to causes they didn’t know existed five minutes ago.
That’s the futurist sales pi
tch. And maybe it’s right—it’s probably too soon to really understand the macro effects of the Internet on charitable giving. The Internet influence on actual charity is a little easier to get a handle on.
The Charities Aid Foundation publishes an annual global index of giving, rating 135 countries based on what percentage of the population donates money, volunteers time, and helps strangers. In the 2013 World Giving Index, the United States came out on top as the most generous nation. (A big comeback after being ranked fifth the year before. USA! USA!) That’s great news, right? Well, not for everyone. In the comments section of one article about the World Giving Index results, the anonymous and eponymous weighed in. One mused about “cheap Christians.” Another disparaged the Salvation Army for not being secular. Still another referred to “Euro misers” and called the Germans and British ugly names. The conversation, if it can be called that, quickly devolved into allegations that conservatives only give money if they can reasonably expect something in return and that liberals only give away other people’s money. On the Internet, even a story about our financial generosity ends up as a demonstration of how uncharitable we are personally.
This isn’t a new problem, mind you. “There is no dearth of charity in the world in giving, but there is comparatively little exercised in thinking and speaking.” Or so wrote Sir Philip Sidney, way back in the sixteenth century, when they didn’t even have PayPal. But the essence of the Internet is such that it takes these innate, if regrettable, impulses and encourages them in ways that Sir Philip couldn’t possibly have imagined. The Web brings the world to your fingertips. In some ways this is great. The world is an interesting place. But there are lots of people in it, and if you’ve ever hung out at a bus station at three o’clock in the morning, you know that a fair number of them are loons. The Internet gives every one of those loons the ability to get right in front of your eyeballs. And the instantaneousness of it means that even the nonloons will sometimes (or often) not give the better angels of their nature time to assert themselves. Add crazy to instantaneous, then multiply that by the anonymity the Web affords, and the net result is there’s nothing to stop anyone from saying whatever the heck pops into their mind, whether they just had three gin and tonics or are genuinely disturbed. And to make sure you see it.
If the Internet is a global village, then comments sections are the town square. And if you’ve never visited, believe me, it’s a place where you don’t want to roll down your window at night. Yet people are fascinated by them. Why is that? You wouldn’t listen to someone named “PsychoBillyCadillac” in real life. But after reading a delightful article on the proper gardening techniques for peonies, there he is. PsychoBillyCadillac thinks peonies are stupid. “What kind of person would let Paeonia flower in their garden?” he wants to know. “Only fascist herbophobes plant peonies. True tolerance demands chrysanthemums.”
And you get upset. Because you really like peonies. You’ve got a whole section of them right there, to the left of the koi pond. And here’s PsychoBillyCadillac, jabbering at you while you sit in your living room with a cup of tea, insulting your flowers and calling you names. After his little rant, the other comments flow like a river, by turns snide, envious, enraged, vengeful, unrelenting, obsessive, and merciless. On the Internet, we call this lovely combination of attributes “snark.”
As a mode of discourse, snark has eaten the Internet. The recipe for making it is simple enough: a dollop of sneering, a dash of bitter insults, scorn to taste, and then about five gallons of sarcasm to drown out any semblance of wit. But the most pernicious aspect of snark is that after consuming it day and night for years, it dulls the moral palate. It is, all on its own, a big part of why we’ve lost the ability to be gracious with one another.
And don’t take my word for it—famous people see it the same way! The metabolism of the Internet is “a genuinely damaging force in our culture,” muses the progressive screenwriter Aaron Sorkin:
I don’t think we’re very nice to each other anymore …. There’s just too much money to be made and too much fun to be had laughing at somebody else fail. And that’s become okay. It used to be the kind of thing that you didn’t do in public…. And now it’s what covers … the homepage of the Huffington Post. “13 Epic #Fails.” There’s the need to put an exclamation point after everything, and there’s the need to … create fantastic stories instead of just reporting on things…. So the adjectives and adverbs that you’ll see in headlines are always about how somebody issued a blistering this against [someone or something]—just anything to get a clip.
Alec Baldwin feels pretty much the same way. After a series of run-ins with paparazzi who caught sight of his blistering temper, the actor published a grand essay saying good-bye to public life:
In the New Media culture, anything good you do is tossed in a pit, and you are measured by who you are on your worst day. What’s the Boy Scout code? Trustworthy. Loyal. Helpful. Friendly. Courteous. Kind. Obedient. Cheerful. Thrifty. Brave. Clean. Reverent. I might be all of those things, at certain moments. But people suspect that whatever good you do, you are faking. You’re that guy. You’re that guy that says this. There is a core of outlets that are pushing these stories out. Breitbart clutters the blogosphere with “Alec Baldwin, he’s the Devil, he’s Fidel Baldwin.” … Even the U.S., which is so preposterously judgmental now. The heart, the arteries of the country are now clogged with hate. The fuel of American political life is hatred.
I know what you’re thinking: Boy, that is rich! Two of the angriest smarty-pants celebrities of the last twenty years think public life is too angry! But the truth is that the vitriol they both saw boomerang back to them can be redirected to anyone, at any time.
On the Internet, every day is Festivus. Remember Festivus? It’s the fictional holiday created by George Costanza’s father on Seinfeld, the dinner celebration of which is capped by an “Airing of Grievances.” George’s father, Frank (played by the great Jerry Stiller), inaugurates the Airing of Grievances by shouting, “I got a lot of problems with you people! And now, you’re gonna hear about it!” Well, we air grievances all day, every day, thanks to the Internet.
We can’t hang it all on the Internet, though. Round-the-clock news on TV isn’t helping either. Air time doesn’t fill itself, you know, which is why we have every microscopic story—woman goes on rampage in McDonald’s! Madonna offends millions with outrageous costume!—tarted up for gavel-to-gavel coverage. And if the “real” “news” wasn’t bad enough, recent decades have seen the rise of “fake” news to boot.
The Daily Show is a satirical newscast, boasting millions of nightly viewers, and it is—as genuine newspapers often bleat masochistically—a primary source of news for many younger Americans. And it’s not just self-hating newspapers puffing up the show. The Pew Foundation’s “Project for Excellence in Journalism” concluded that “The Daily Show is clearly impacting American dialogue” and “getting people to think critically about the public square.”
Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. To think critically means to judge carefully. The Daily Show makes critical thinking difficult, if not impossible, because of the industrial-strength snark that coats every aspect of the show.
Remember how Aaron Sorkin pointed out that the adjectives and adverbs you’ll see in headlines are always about how somebody issued a “blistering” attack? Here’s a sampling of recent headlines about The Daily Show: “Jon Stewart Slams … ,” “Jon Stewart Blasts … ,” “Jon Stewart Rips … ,” “Jon Stewart Goes Off … ,” “Jon Stewart Is Shocked … ,” “Jon Stewart Rips …” (again), “Jon Stewart Can’t Deal with Idiots … ,” “Jon Stewart Rips …” (yet again), “Jon Stewart Hits … ,” “Jon Stewart Mocks … ,” “Jon Stewart Rips …” (still again), and “Jon Stewart Calls Out….” You get the picture.
All of those headlines were taken from a single website, the Huffington Post (give Sorkin another gold star) over a three-month period. There is no intellectual charity
on The Daily Show. It is simply an exercise in pandering to an audience that needs to feel superior and to political elites whose positions the show’s staff support. All arguments from political enemies are assumed to be in bad faith, and ad hominem is standard operating procedure.
Satire can be a wonderfully persuasive tool. However, satire and irony lose all impact when they’re part of our constant cultural diet and present in nearly all political discourse. Meaningful communication is rendered impossible.
Whether it’s the real media, social media, or fake news shows, we have a charity problem in our culture.
The comedian Louis C. K. has a riff about why he won’t buy a phone with Internet capability for his daughters. His rationale? He wants them to learn empathy. “You know, kids are mean … They look at a kid and they go, ‘You’re fat,’ and then they see the kid’s face scrunch up and they go, ‘Oh, that doesn’t feel good to make a person do that,’” C. K. says. “But when they write, ‘You’re fat’ [on the Internet, from their smartphone], then they just go, ‘Mmm, that was fun, I like that.’”
The Seven Deadly Virtues Page 7