“The refusal to mourn leads to despair.”
— Jonathan Lear

Hours and decades spent hiking the backcountry has only whetted my interest in the rampant cultural and individual despair so obvious in our society today.

Whence this universal sorrowing and intense trivialization of postmodern life?

Way back in April 1976, my partner and I were startled by an intense mourning ritual at a Greek Orthodox Easter celebration near Sparta.

While working for six weeks as trench archaeologists at Isthmia, near the village called Ancient Corinth, we were guests (philoxenia) of Greek friends at their church deep in the Peloponnese.

After hours of a fast that had begun on Good Friday with a procession through the small town (population 15,000) bearing an effigy of Christ lying on a bier, residents assembled at the church just before midnight on Saturday, April 24.

At the stroke of midnight, the area exploded outside the church with firecrackers and fireworks, cries of joy, shouts of “Christos Anesti — Alithos Anesti” (“He is risen — truly He is risen”).

My point here is that the ritual mourning then made the transition into exuberance and the expulsion of despair.

Today, we can discern dark doubts about our civilization, and many observers describe the fears that also accompany worrisome angst over the fate of the Earth. And some critics are just questioning the meaning of the human species itself.

Certain wise elders in our society believe we’ve lost the capacity for true mourning, and this affects our ability to find joy in play, but this loss also feeds into the rampant cultural despair now engulfing us.

Themes of war and destruction dominate in film and literature, along with dire predictions about our planet’s health. (Although Earth Day has become a positive ritual, some of the declarations seem dismal to the young.)

Some European scholars hark back 106 years to the publication of Oswald Spengler’s book, The Decline of the West, as a sort of benchmark or omen.

Yes, Spengler was an anti-liberal nationalist, a kind of idiot savant, but his book’s title perfectly embodied the early 20th-century zeitgeist. Recall “the Roaring ’20s and all that,” and the sad disillusionment caused by the “Great War’s” unprecedented death horrors. (It wasn’t called World War I until after World War II ended in 1945.)

Sigmund Freud and others lost their confidence in scientific progress, just as humans began turning away from belief in organized religions. Ernest Hemingway and the Lost Generation in Paris, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, the mysterious H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby — their disillusionment lingers in our consciousness today.

It may be that the early 21st-century careens just as wildly as American and European societies right after the Great War, and this veering away from optimism to a general despair and cultural pessimism affects everyone, but especially today’s younger humans.

Adam Kirsch has just written eloquently about The Revolt Against Humanity — Imagining a Future Without Us. Author Cheryl Strayed (Wild) is also typical in her recent essay titled “Most of Us Are Broken,” and a host of other culture critics chime in to moan vocally about despondency and the sad “spirit of our time” (4-1-1).

Viewers endure huge portions of on-screen media hours devoted to the grinding destruction in Russia’s war on Ukraine, see reports of senseless random killings (including the murder of schoolchildren), and experience ranting “politicians” who rave about nothing while the numbers of homeless continue to soar and novel pandemics lurk on the fringes.

Can you imagine how even some of this depresses our youth?

As a teacher of adolescents in California and Bavaria for 40 years, I believe our greatest concern should focus on the awful ways this negativity impacts our children’s minds, especially during those years from birth to the end of junior high school (age 15).

As I’ve written before, we must reverse the trend toward total “screen life,” instant communication via handheld devices, video-game obsession, and endless swimming in a world composed of social media or entombed in one’s own self-chosen chat room (e.g., Discord, like alleged classified national defense information leaker Jack Teixeira).

Dragging kids into the inspiring out-of-doors to combat negativity had its challenges in the 1980s and ’90s, but back then most parents were still on board with some discipline and rigor in the academic environment at school as well as on the trail.

My own independent school heavily emphasized team sports and outdoor physical competitions, and especially hiking.

We made many service trips into Baja California with eighth-graders, and together explored Death Valley, Yosemite, Catalina Island, the American River’s gold country, the Santa Barbara County backcountry and more.

The atmosphere in the day would feel quite conservative now, although we at that school believed in the Montessori/constructivist outlook and Jean Piaget’s “play-as-work” ethos.

From 1980 to 2016, I learned many vital things from each of the four headmasters at Crane Country Day School in Montecito. One of them asserted the wise and firm belief that cynicism and negativity were the very worst attitudes a school could inculcate in children.

This individual would say clearly and often, “We aspire to become a ‘yes’ school, emanating kindness, and that we’re in this with the kids and not above them” (4-1-1 Dan McCaslin and Debbie Williams).

Like kerosene poured onto a campfire, the blaze of cynicism ultimately burns down into the ashes of hopelessness, and eventually into genuine individual depressions.

In despair, those human bonds binding us together fade since we’ve abandoned so many of the old-time community rites and rituals, and I don’t simply mean the loss of attendance at church (Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, 4-1-1).

Eminent philosopher Jonathan Lear reasons that “the refusal to mourn sustains despair” (4-1-1). The young are inheriting a sorrowful world-view (Weltanschauung) without many meaningful group rituals, and most have lost the capacity to mourn, according to Lear.

Our sorrow comes from the unique fact that the very basis of our civilization has been challenged because it is wrecking the global environment with fossil fuel addiction and endless war, and some people even doubt democracy (like in the 1920s and ’30s).

Freud revealed his own shock at the dispiriting horrors of WWI, writing in 1916 about his loss of faith in the West because “the war shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization … and (it) tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science” (quoted in Lear, p. 24).

Freud ached because Western civilization “robbed us of very much that we had loved.”

I taught “Western Civilization” classes for many decades at many levels and not only at Crane (e.g., University of Maryland, UC Santa Barbara and Loyola Marymount University), and spent six months roaming the Metropolitan Museum of Art mooning over great artistic creations of the West.

I mourn with Freud that the monuments of “old dead white men” have become so dishonored and devalued.

Lear, a psychiatrist, emphasizes the spiritual heaviness in trying “to repair psychic damage of living through world catastrophe.”

Many of the young have been enveloped in negativity and an acceptance that we ARE living in a world catastrophe — a sort of Mis-Anthropocene.

It is especially our children who are witnessing the rollout of the planetary crisis, the ruinous wars and inability to grapple with the fallout from overpopulation, absurd politics, internet madness and the resultant profound despair.

If we look hard, we observe bewilderment in the face of impending planetary catastrophe.

Yet the situation is not hopeless, and Lear lucidly shows that we can indeed relocate meaning in our lives by learning how to mourn in this disenchanted world, a reality my five grandchildren will face much longer than I will (disclosure: age 75).

Transience and mourning would seem to arise together, and if we identify less with our formerly great civilization and celebrate more together in rituals like Earth Day and Thanksgiving, and practice simple gratitude rites, we can realize that true mourning — counting our losses — has always been a way of remembering.

I can no longer lead gnarly hikes to the lost gold mine in Baja Nord or play soccer, but mourning these past times infuses me with joy when I witness my granddaughter at play. With luck we can make a gentle hike together into Rattlesnake Canyon and relax.

Lear shows us in 144 brilliant pages how we may find solace in our civilization’s failings and joy in future challenges by mourning our mistakes as we learn from them.

Just like on the long trail, momentary pauses honoring the moment, the dying oak tree, eventually energize us to move forward again with vigor and full-hearted desire.

4-1-1

Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End — Mourning and the Ethical Life (Harvard University Press, 2022); O. Spengler, The Decline of the West (originally in German, 1918); Adam Kirsch, The Revolt Against Humanity — Imagining a Future Without Us (Columbia, 2023); C. Strayed, “Most of Us Are Broken.”

Dan McCaslin and Debbie Williams, Celebrating 90 Years of Crane School (2018); Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (Polity 2020).

Han explains how unchecked neoliberalism and forces of production have created a 21st century crisis of community: Our youth endure a narcissistic cult of authenticity with a mass turning-inward, e.g., Teixeira only cared to impress members of his fellow 600-member Discord chat-group. We see various pathologies and they surface since we feel like individuals afloat in an atomized society, each rushing down his/her rabbit hole, a place where the loss of the symbolic structures of ritual behavior have led to overdependence on the particular to fashion individual identity.