The Cultivation of Nonchalance
IN the September Atlantic, Agnes Repplier pleads for a tautening of ‘nerve’; pleads for training in old-fashioned tasks; for the robuster joy that comes from a job well done, and never from pleasures of idleness; pleads that we cease to tuck pillows underneath the sinner; pleads that we keep the world an austere place where ‘strong incentives and impelling measures’ shall maintain the ‘ walls of human resistance’ mortared and moated against attack.
As a lay citizen I agree and applaud. Certainly we do breathe too much the lackadaisical air. We rest the major corner of too many responsibilities on other supports than our own shoulders; we are lenient with the idle and overdelicate with the invalid; religion is honeyed to a sickish sweet, and morality travels with a pardoner.
But as a psychologist I ask myself, can we hope ever to revert to the ancient austerities of conduct and still remain wholesome and sane, when meantime our environment has become so suddenly complex? Can we expect to handle the increased nervous traffic of our day without increasing our office force ?
I am accustomed to think in terms of nerves and nervous systems, — those delicate mechanisms that have evolved from immemorial time to aid an organism, perennially ill-adapted, to adjust itself to an imperious environment. A thousand years pass. Selective processes do their best, and yet the change resultant in nervous structure is trifling. But within a single generation, so prodigious are inventions that the increase of nervous environment may be doubled.
Ours is the Age of Irritants. Our surprised nervous systems submit perforce to bombardments of stimuli that stagger them. More nervous energy is expended in ten minutes of Broadway than would have been demanded formerly in a pilgrimage to Rome. As a destroyer of nerves, the single invention of the automobile has probably more victims to its credit than the campaigns of all the war-lords. Lights flash at us, horns shrill at us, speeding things rush us from place to place, ’step lively’ and ‘watch your step’ are the mottoes of the hour. But still we own the same old brand of nervous system that our forebears used in more reposeful times. In short, between our nervous abilities and the problems of the newer environments which they are called upon to solve, there is coming to be an ever-widening gap. So nerves are failing to ‘adapt.’
Is not, then, some of this flabbiness of nerve-fibre, against which Miss Repplier rightly warns us, a kind of unconscious compromise, necessitated by the discrepancy between demand and supply of nerve-force? Can we, after all, dispatch our modern tasks by merely turning on a greater will-power?
Miss Repplier implies that we can: ‘ Every woman who has toiled for hours . . . has felt the nervous fatigue which does not crave rest, but distraction, which makes her want to “go.” Every woman worth her salt has overcome this weakness, has mastered this desire.
Now whenever I hear ‘desire’ called ‘weakness,’ and its suppression called ‘mastery,’ I confess that I wince. It is a singular but ponderable fact that the patients who fill the waiting-rooms of our psychiatrists in increasing numbers are largely persons ‘who have mastered their desires.' It is usually for this very reason that they are become ‘patients.’ If psychology be right about it, true self-control is not suppression, but sublimation or transformation. The desire, natural and normal enough of itself, must be allowed expression, if not in one way then in another. To ‘master’ it merely, namely to repress it, is absolutely dangerous. Some day the repressed desire will come to its own.
Miss Repplier is in so far right: the doing of hard tasks is not ‘waste of energy,’ but a builder of fibre, mental and moral, no less than physical. On the other hand, tasks cannot be considered apart from the environment which conditions them. Are we not being asked to do the same hard task now under the handicap of several atmospheres of pressure? To do the job well, and at the same time conserve mental health, calls to-day for more nervous expenditure than it did even a generation ago. If living be more complex, while nervous systems remain the same, what compensation shall we provide?
This compensation need not, I take it, be physical. So far as work is concerned, mere work, our nerves exhibit an extraordinary margin of safety. l\e all possess untapped sources of energy for tasks, as such. Physically, man is still fit enough. We have no need, to date, of more nerves, or bigger ones. The failure of nerves, as any psychiatrist will testify, is primarily due to a false mental attitude engendered by the artificialities of our present scale of living. The compensating strength must come from a fresh mental attitude. With this proper Bewusstseinslage, office efficiency is increased, and the newer demands of our twentieth century can be met without injury. I have yet to meet a case of plain, uncomplicated ‘overwork.’
This mental attitude for which I plead has the elements of indifference in it. In exaggerated form we call it smugness. Now it is true that smugness in the raw has little to commend it, psychologically or otherwise. Fortunately one seldom meets smugness pure, perhaps because smug folk exert themselves so inconsiderably that they do not get in the way. Theirs is an order of retired conceit; they live on their mental interest, as it were. One is reminded of the beef creatures, placid, soggy, stubborn. The cud of their complacency appears never to stale, and neither the refreshments of social intercourse nor its stimulation seem indispensable. It is as if their minds became stalls, and they live in them, content. Viewed as companions in a possible friendship, they are a total loss.
Despite all this my thesis is, that there is much to learn from smugness.
When one has exhausted adjectival invective, — has caught the smirk, the mentally folded hands, the exquisite vanity; when one has compared the fatty-mindedness and inertia of smug folk toward new ideas with the characteristics of whatever humbler creatures malevolent imagination may conjure up, one may yet, with old Sir Roger, find something for the defendant. There is, after all, a quality in the slag of their passive egotism that is worth the mining. Most of us lack a certain kind of smugness.
Life, so the physicians tell us, consists in the maintenance of equilibrium. The amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, sodium, potassium, magnesium, sulphur, iron, calcium, phosphorous, and chlorine, — namely, the necessary ingredients of that protoplasmic sea we call our bodies, —these must be maintained, as they have been maintained through the ages, in relatively the same proportions, in order for life to exist. Disease is but a disruption of the balance; convalescence its restoration.
Now smug folk, like as not, have a bit too much sulphur in their gray matter, or too little magnesium in their blood. But this unfortunate disproportion shall not blind us to the value of sulphur and magnesium as life-constituents. Properly compounded, their contribution to organic processes is great.
In vain I search for simple language to express this good compound. Suppose we tailor a term to order and call it ego-centric nonchalance. To cultivate and bring to fruitage an indifference to one’s personal, private, selfish self, is to possess ego-centric nonchalance. I know of no more wholesome quality than such a mental attitude. One should take a heaping teaspoonful before and after each meal, and a double dose on waking. And nonchalance, I take it, is the pith-principle of smugness.
This good kind of smugness, this indifference to self, stands out sharply enough in the mind of the physician, who sees so much of its opposite, worry. Worry, when you come to analyze it, is not a social vice. We worry chiefly over those things which concern the ME. Show me that what impends will leave My bank-account intact, My health unimpaired, My friends and family out, and any further tormenting solicitude that I may feel is frankly academic. I may still take thought and use preventive measures, but I cease, as if by magic, to worry over the outcome. On the contrary, I can now work for the accomplishment. of my object better than ever before. For most worry is not only an arch form of selfishness, but it is the great inhibitor of action. We say, ‘ I am worried’; we mean, ‘I fear for myself.’ This is the opposite of nonchalance.
Phobism is an addiction to fear (another name for worry). If smugness be unlovely from a social point of view, phobism is fatal to its victim. Did it ever occur to you that fear can become a habit and a luxury, just as smoking is ? But phobism is the more hazardous. We fear poverty, we fear disease, we fear death, we fear that we shall be snubbed, socially. And each separate fear impairs our capacity for work in a definite, measurable way. I know many people addicted to the use of fear. Some of them use it to excess. To the psychologist, fear is the most expensive of all habits that people indulge. Ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths per cent of fear is as useless as a deck hand on a submarine.
I have in mind a man whom Miss Repplier should pronounce ‘excellent.’ lie has, so far as I can observe, all the sturdy virtues for which she entreats. But this Air. Pratt is essentially an inefficient man, made inefficient by his mental attitude. He is a provisional farmer, and he lives about a mile and a half from here as the crow flies (over the hill). I wish I had him here. He is one of the finest specimens of a phobist in the captivity of my social horizon. He once, so discreet rumor has it, was a barber. If so, he now conceals the fact under a flowing black beard. (Who ever heard of a barber with a beard?) Some relative, I believe, left him money, and he ‘retired to a farm.’ Men do worse things with windfalls.
He has a quiet, homey little wife, and three children, — one married, two in school; all are making good. So far as one can see, he has plenty of bread and butter, with a good bit of life’s jam spread on top of it. His place up the lane really is one of the most comfortable spots anywhere around here. You could not find the ‘makings’ of less trouble in another family in the country.
Yet Mr. Pratt has one of the finest collections of fears that I ever saw, felt, or endured hearing about.
For instance, take the weather. When I go there to neighbor, as I drive to and from town, the weather-topic bobs up early in the conversation (a compliment to his avocation). It is always portentous weather, somehow, over the hill. When we get a perfect day, say one of those rare ones in New England’s October, when there’s been rain enough, dew enough, dry enough, and no killing frost, and the air is crisp and rich with sunshine, and I exclaim, ‘Well, Mr. Pratt, isn’t this a corker?’ ‘ Mmm,’ says Mr. Pratt, ‘ it’s a weatherbreeder, though.’
I feel morally certain that Mr. Pratt goes over himself mentally every morning for symptoms of bodily shipwreck, or mental impairment. I told him once that he had ingrowing thoughts.
What is mischievous in the fear attitude is not its social unendurableness. We should be able to get along with the complainers, and willingly would cheer them up a bit now and then, if that were all. But the attitude of fear is essentially secretive and repressive; normal expressiveness and the springs of initiative are choked at the source. So restrictive is fear that he whom it controls can never hope to achieve beyond the routine, and if he be instigated to ‘big tasks’ he ‘loses nerve.’ All evolutional processes teach this: that fear puts one on the defensive, and that aggression becomes impossible. Even the arteries and glands of the body contract. One becomes a less fit animal.
It is this worry, or fear for self, engendered by the tensions of our newfashioned ways, that makes for that ‘nervous fatigue which docs not crave rest, but distraction.' Nerves get tetanized and will not relax. To enforce the rigid discipline of task and precept no longer brings results. To talk of ‘zest in work’ is but a farcical euphemism to nerves that are overstrung.
Psychology has discovered within the last decade just how dangerous our repressions are. Ideas and emotions represent energy, and unless we expend the energy it becomes dammed back in tho nervous system like so much steam under pressure, and sooner or later will explode, — or slowly fester like a tumor until the whole body is poisoned. The mind must be kept free from thoughts that clog. And the mental prophylaxis is a constant attitude of nonchalance. By changing our mental attitudes of apprehension to attitudes of nonchalance we accomplish as much as if we were able to increase our actual nervous capabilities, for we are rid of the greatest obstruction to action. To introduce system in an office is belter than adding a clerk. This is good psychology, every word of it.
If I were going to attempt a sermon (and who does not feel himself capable of at least a couple?) my first text should be upon the theme: Shifting Gears. I should begin with a Pertinent Illustration. It would be the picture of a motor-car and a long hill. You size up the hill from the bottom, and attempt it on the high gear. The grade proves to be steeper than you at first thought. The engine begins to pound. But you have vowed to make the top on the high gear. By simply shifting over, with whatever reluctance, all would be well. Instead of that, you let the engine fret and throb, perhaps stall itself or wreck something, for your pride’s sake. This the picture. Then the Moral Application (which every one has seen coming all along). ‘Now, good friends, isn’t this just what we are trying to do? Are we not playing the foolish chauffeur, and wearing out our engines needlessly, when we attempt to take all life’s roads on the high speeds? Shift your gears before it is too late!’
To aspiring youth we shall hold up 1 he stars, but when one sits in the office of the psychiatrist and sees panting humanity, struggling, fear-filled, superstitious, overanxious, pouring in for help to bear unbearable and usually fictitious burdens, one feels like exclaiming, ‘Why, in the name of heaven, do you take yourself so seriously? Nothing matters so much as all that.’
‘There are two things which I abhor,’ says Mahomet, ‘the learned in his infidelities, and the fool in his devotions.’
Not that, devotions are foolish, but that the fool misplaces his devotion. It is a matter of emphasis.
A youth whom I know prides himself upon his indomitable Will. Once committed to a position, that thing must be done, however trivial, or whatever the obstacle. When a decision is once made, it is raised ipso facto to the highest power of importance. Recently, in semi-private, he found occasion to remonstrate with his sister for allowing herself to be persuaded to play the piano, after at first demurring. ‘ If you yield to what other people ask, you will weaken your will-power,’ he said in substance. Just the contrary! Such tenacity to the form is itself symptomatic of weakness. Only the strong will dares to be inconsistent. Over-solicitousness is the hall-mark of a phobia, a repressed fear. To the psychologist such an attitude is the ground-swell that marks a storm somewhere. My acquaintance is really fearful for his own powers of resistance.
It is an excellent thing to have some principles to which one is, upon occasion, false. Inconsistencies in small things may reserve force for the larger tasks. If one try to indue each undertaking with solemn and portentous meaning, he may find nerve lacking in the crisis. In his essay on Culture, Emerson writes: ‘A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. How can you mind diet, bed, dress, or salutes or compliments, or the figure you make in company, or wealth, or even the bringing things to pass, — when you think how paltry are the machinery and the workers?’ The more solemnly a man conceives his task, the more nonchalantly does he view himself. If this indifference have something of smugness in it, by so much is smugness commendable.
So I suggest, perhaps it is not that the ‘old belief . . . that the making of a good job out of a given piece of work ’ as the ‘highest thing on earth’ has ‘lost its hold upon the world,’ but rather that the world, needlessly overfretted, has lost its grip upon such jobs. Knowledge need not be necessarily ‘made so attractive . . . that school children will absorb it with delight,’ but something must be found to compensate for the unusual conditions of strain under which we labor. As life becomes more complex we can afford less energy expended self-ward. So long as we bear the double burden of task and worry, joy in work can never come, and nervous systems will continue ‘eloquently to demand’ the distractions of amusement.
To come to take one’s personal fortunes nonchalantly, to wear them ‘ lak a loose garment,’ to feel the earnestness of life and still smile, this is the finesse of good living.