Early in the novel Playground, the latest work by acclaimed American author Richard Powers, a boy named Rafi struggles to respond to an essay prompt on a private-school application: “What is the most important quality any person could possess?” At the last minute, an answer dawns on him. “Without the ability to feel sad,” he writes, “a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn’t care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were.”
Antonio Damasio, Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, noted in early 2018—just as being in our “feels” was becoming a thing—that “feelings can annoy us or delight us, but that is not what they are for.” Emotions, he wrote, are for “life regulation, providers of information concerning basic homeostasis or the social conditions of our lives.” They warn us of risks, alert us to opportunities, and guide us toward behaviors that will “make us better human beings, more responsible for our own future and the future of others.” I suspect that Damasio would agree with the fictional Rafi that “sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were.”
America is in its feels about Election Day. Recent reports find us by turns stressed, quarrelsome, anxious, and sleepless in these final days—and why wouldn’t we be? Political scientist Andrew Civettini observed in The Atlantic that “voters on both sides of the aisle are being given a message that if the other side wins, this will be the end of American democracy as they know it.” Our emotional selves might be forgiven for interpreting such information as incompatible with Damasio’s “basic homeostasis”—with psychological steadiness and tranquility—yet Civettini notes, too, that anxiety about politics “could have positive learning effects” by causing us to pay more attention to events in our world. “It’s not obvious to me,” he concludes, “that we should want to reduce political emotions”—not for the sake of ourselves, and perhaps, recalling Rafi’s definition of sadness, not for the sake of others.
The researchers Thomas Szanto and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen write that “individuals self-categorize and identify as members of a political community and form emotions about events concerning that group, even if they are not personally involved in the event, and even if there may in fact be no community in the relevant sense.” At MICDS, however, we do inhabit community in the relevant sense. Yes, our students, like the vast majority of their fellow Americans, experience political emotions in imagined community with countless strangers; but they also experience them in authentic community with one another, in response to events on our campus and in each other’s lives in which they are indeed personally involved and invested. “One of the things that I value most about being at MICDS is the way that we take care of each other,” said Carla Federman, our JK-12 History and Social Sciences Department Chair, at our Upper School assembly last Friday. Her remarks specifically emphasized the capacity of antisemitic hatred not only to threaten Jewish students, but, if not confronted, to fracture the foundation of trust on which our community stands. They were also broadly reflective of the commitments in our Mission to embrace all people with compassion and to stand for what is good and right. “We are responsible for each other, and we are responsible to each other. That’s who we are. What we do, and how we treat other people, here, matters.”
Happiness is essential to emotional well-being, as I have contended before, and it is also insufficient. Happy people make lousy music after all. Sadness plays an indispensable part in our love and in our joy. “The sharing of sorrow,” Albert Schweitzer once said, “expands your capacity to share joy as well.” Political emotions are running high. We do not know what awaits us after Tuesday, and we are to varying degrees stressed, quarrelsome, anxious, sleepless, and sad. Perhaps it is healthy, for ourselves and for others, to be in such a state. “The greatest tragedy is to live without tragedy,” insists Eric G. Wilson in Against Happiness. “The blues are clues to the sublime.”
At MICDS, we do know what awaits us after Tuesday. It will be Wednesday, and we will welcome the arrival of our students on that day as every day as our world keeps moving forward. I began this letter with Richard Powers, so I will end it with him, whose 1991 novel The Gold Bug Variations had this to say about science—but which, I believe, can be said just as truly about life: “Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.”
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. My best wishes to you and your loved ones for a weekend filled with the capacity for joy. Happy November.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist: Birds of a Feather by Billie Eilish (Apple Music / Spotify)