1.
When we know, we do not need to think. We think when we have doubt about something definite. Doubt, however, is definite. I doubt something. But what if I have the feeling of doubt without being able to say what it is about?
We might call that feeling anxiety.
I encounter this feeling not only in my personal life, as we all do, but in a professional context. Teaching public speaking forces me to confront the anxiety of others regularly. More surprising, I think, is how an entire field that is devoted to teaching this subject has produced almost no thought about it. The “thinking” about the anxiety that attends public speaking is almost entirely confined to borrowed research on performance anxiety, jitters, and pop psychology. The “thinking” begins with an axiom: our job is to help students overcome this anxiety. And the remedies here are pretty facile. Practice makes perfect. Just get up there. Imagine the audience in their underwear. A hypothesis: this is the outcome of the field’s own anxiety, its inability to respond with definite knowledge when called upon to teach.
The refusal to think about anxiety as an experience is a failure to recognize that it has content, despite the anxious person’s disavowals (“I just get so nervous!” “I don’t know why it makes me feel this way!”) or pat explanations (“This is just how I am!” “This is not for me!” “I am bad at it!”). But the appropriate response to this anxiety, as a teacher anyway, is not to uncover the unconscious secrets of the anxious person (please god no) but to help them see that anxiety might be mediated by thought. The feeling of drowning in unnamed immediacy makes the anxious person demanding and defiant. But this demand must be resisted, not in order to punish, but in order to help.
The demand of anxiety is a refusal to think it. A recent story in The Boston Globe reports on “school refusal” due to anxiety. It’s surprising that this story is even being reported, since, as they admit, it’s impossible to “quantify” how many cases of chronic absenteeism are “caused” by anxiety. But it can still be known from specific cases that “debilitating anxiety is keeping kids from school for months at a time,” and we can extrapolate that these cases don’t represent the full picture. My point in bringing up this context isn’t to disparage these young people whose lives are often unbearable. It is no help or use to compare their lives to other, harder ones. Not only is that brutalizing—making the wretched of the earth a prop in the disciplining of others’ emotions—but it misunderstands that anxiety is not a response to some present pain, but some real lack.
I met with a former student today who told me about how, when she began taking my class, she was “beefing” with it. I have heard variations on that before. Her analysis of why, though, was very canny. Everyone, she felt, was just treading water. The classroom, when it presents something challenging or doubtful, at first feels like it just adds to this barely manageable task of organizing one’s life. It takes time to realize that it is the thinking itself that will help.
One can only get out of anxiety by thinking, even as thinking intensifies our anxiety.
2.
What if we consider anxiety not as an individual phenomenon, but as a mass feeling?
Aggression is always popular. Anxiety never is. Modernity, to use an outdated word, transformed the popular into the mass. Mass aggression can be sublimated into sports, mass anxiety by financialization. Instead of doubt, there is risk. Risk can create debt and profit. But as a mass, we never think.
If today there is no collective experience, there may still be mass feelings, and the tendency that takes shape in mass feeling is observable in the most generic cultural forms. The changes in these mass feelings are not consciously experienced: they not a an era’s taste or Kunstwollen, but what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling.” I would characterize the general aggression of this moment as the enjoyment of other’s necessity. More to be said on that, perhaps, elsewhere. But contemporary anxiety is less easy to define. Indeed, anxiety might be the feeling of lacking definition.
We can see this anxiety expressed in all of the obvious “collective” behaviors—doomscrolling, sleeplessness, disordered eating. But the desire that is in these behaviors is also a collective one. When we doomscroll, are we not waiting something to appear? Something that would redeem and define our amorphous experience? This desire can easily be transformed into mass aggression and violence. Narratives that give us a definite role, even if it is a minor one, soothe the subjective anxiety of uncertainty. People want to rid themselves of this anxiety far more than they desire “pleasure.” Though I rarely find George Orwell as insightful as others seem to, I do think that in his review of Mein Kampf (not nearly as trenchant as Kenneth Burke’s though), he made a very important point:
The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.
I think Orwell shows his idiocy to call them “psychologically…sounder,” but fascism is psychologically more resonant than its alternatives because it responds to mass anxiety. If we want to be able to respond to the political turmoil of our time, perhaps one of our responses should be to respond less often, less quickly, and with less urgency to define. Instead, let us listen to the unsettling tone of anxiety in all the confidence and triumph of those who feel they are at the brink of victory, and the narrativizing relief in all the apparent pessimism and despair of those who believe they are announcing our collective doom.
3.
Anxiety can be good because it can be a motive to think. Anxiety, however, can also be a motive for anything. It is a force that demands we escape it.
When Auden wrote, in his Age of Anxiety
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
he hit on something that is true of anxiety, but almost, I feel, by accident. Illusions do not die by some confrontation with the truth: that is the greatest illusion of the age of anxiety. Much better is Joni Mitchell’s beautiful song “Both Sides Now”:
Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
Looked at clouds that wayBut now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my wayI've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
The maturity that it takes to realize that the illusions do not die and that we can nevertheless say “I really don’t know” is the paradoxical conclusion of genuine education.
Certainty will not save us, and commitments that are formed out of the fear of appearing uncommitted cannot be relied upon. We need principles precisely because the world is so profoundly uncertain, and we are unknowable even to ourselves. To accept anxiety is not to sit with it as if it had no power, but to acknowledge that we are so subject to it because we ourselves are subjects. It is subjectivity itself that is at stake in anxiety — and it is good that we are subjected to the uncertainty of ourselves.
Thank you for this.
"Certainty will not save us, and commitments that are formed out of the fear of appearing uncommitted cannot be relied upon." This resonates strongly with me at present, and I really appreciate your work here. Here's to embracing anxiety for what it is rather than running from it.