Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 16

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generations of children who have not known what it means to suffer
deprivation on a mass scale. And while the sentimental idea that
sobering automatically ennobles individuals and cultures is a
pernicious fiction, still, as the psychoanalyst Rollo May has written,
a sense of the tragic does "make possible the most humane emotions—
like pity in the ancient Greek sense, sympathy for one's fellow man,
and understanding."^^ por the Greek tragedians (Oedipus; "I would
be blind to misery not to pity my people kneeling at my feet"), such
emotions were commensurate with heroism.
What are the long-term consequences of living in a culture in
collective denial of "the transcendent meaning of suffering and
death"? This question has been asked and answered before: by the
Roman historian Livy, for example, who concluded: "We have
reached the point where our vices and their cures are equally
abhorrent." Livy was two generations older than Seneca, who wrote:
"To feel pain at the misfortunes of others is a weakness unworthy of
the wise man." Two generations before Livy, Cicero asked: "What is
the use of being kind to a poor man?"^^ After them, of course, the
barbarians.
Cicero, Livy, and Seneca aren't the only Romans who speak to
us from two millennia ago. In his book Civilisation, Kenneth Clark
points to a famous scene in The Aeniad of Virgil, when the wandering
hero Aeneas is washed ashore in a strange country "which he fears is
inhabited by barbarians." Unlike the citizens of C.P. Cavafy's town,
however, Aeneas doesn't relish the prospect of their arrival. He isn't
spiritually exhausted, only tired and frightened. "Then," Clark
adds, "as he looks around he sees some figures carved in relief, and he
says: 'These men know the pathos of life, and mortal things touch
their hearts.'"^ ^
Thanks in large part to television, itself the product of the
most affluent society in history, public encounters with the pathos of
life usually come at second hand; like as not, mortal things are
experienced as images on an electronic screen. But TV hasn't simply
razed to the ground our cultural constructions of heroism and tragedy;
it has also rebuilt them out of the still-smoldering ashes. This has
happened in two ways: directly, as a result of actually watching TV,
or indirectly, as a result of TV's oft-documented power to erode the
attention span of its mass audience. Thus, as Joshua Meyrowitz puts
it, our new heroes