Weeping in an Existential Void

The November, 2002, issue of Commentary magazine, included an excellent article entitiled Mourning Without Meaning, by Michael J. Lewis, chairman of the art department at Williams College. In the article, Lewis examines Americans' attempts, on the first anniversary of September 11, to mourn its victims in public memorials. Lewis argues that it was the tendency of the ceremonies on that occasion to elevate "collective mourning over collective purpose," and he offers a compelling explanation of how the therapeutic model of national grieving has become entrenched in our public rituals:

"In one aspect, however, the three ceremonies and their countless counterparts throughout America differed fundamentally from a religious service: they could offer little consolation to the living. The rites and rituals of the world's great religions provide a set of measured and incremental steps by which the business of grieving gives way to the business of life. Human feeling -- of the most agonized sort -- is an accompaniment to the process, to be addressed with kindness and sympathy; but it is not the primary object.

Our modern public rites, by contrast, pivot about our feelings, and tend mainly to ratify them. They are conducted in such a way as to promote and encourage emotionality rather than to restore a sense of divine or cosmic -- or national -- order. In this sense, our bout of grieving has been therapeutic rather than spiritual in character. And like therapy it must be repeated to be effective . . .

It has become a commonplace to contrast the response to the September 11 attacks with the response to the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, whose first anniversary was noted, if at all, only in order to renew a fierce sense of national resolve. At that time, the negatives of grief and loss were viewed in their relation to positives -- that is, action and purpose. Death in general was seen as pointless or meaningful, tragic or heroic, depending on its relation to larger things.

Clearly, we now have a very different sense of what it means for a nation to grieve. And that different sense has to do with our loss of those same "larger things," which have become a subject of great embarrassment to enlightened American opinion in the intervening years. Patriotism, sacrifice, democracy, idealism -- for many college-educated Americans of a certain age, these are mawkish shams. Rather than uniting us, they divide us. The great debunking of the cardinal American virtues over the last decades has left us little on which to agree, especially when it comes to war. That may be one reason why so much importance attaches to mourning, one of the very few exceptions and, it seems, always and everywhere a proper response to meaningful public events."

And Lewis concludes:

"The violent attacks of last year occurred on television, and it is on television that America, one year later, sought catharsis. But ceremonies alone, however noble and touching, will not set right what has gone wrong. Without a sense of purpose, we are left to grieve alone, fumbling our way to an internal resolution that will not come. Until we can fit our grief into the larger scheme of things, we weep in an existential void."

So on this third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, is it too much to hope that, as we mourn the dead, we can also struggle toward some sense of collective purpose that fits those deaths into a larger meaning -- that subsumes our grief into an appropriate sense of national resolve? Certainly, let's weep. But then let's roll.