On June 23, Nik Wallenda,
the aerialist, walked a distance of 1400 feet across a gorge in the Grand Canyon
on a cable suspended 1500 feet above the ground, without a tether or safety net.
He stopped and crouched twice in his twenty-minute journey to cope with the
wind and the unsettling rhythm of the cable. “The
Hollywood Reporter said that the response to Wallenda’s death-defying stunt
was simply overwhelming, with almost 13 million viewers tuning into the
Discovery Channel at the peak of the walk.”
One question is why does a death-defying act compel
attention? A simple answer is that it arouses us emotionally, opening us up to
range of intense feelings, as long of course as we remain spectators. These feelings
-- fear, suspense, thrill, the cycle of tension and release, even pain-- help
us feel more alive. These feelings also throw into relief what we too often experience
as the tedium of our daily lives, what Thoreau once famously called our “lives
of quiet desperation.” Action and horror films, with their counterpoint of the
heroes we identify with and the dangers they face, milk this contrast, allowing
us in fantasy to escape the obligations and enmeshments that make real risk-taking
seem foolhardy. Wallenda’s wire walking does us one better, he is walking
on a real cable in real time.
One hypothesis is that extreme sports -- base-jumping, sky-dividing, hang-gliding, soloing,
mountaineering-- have become increasingly popular because they bring us
close to danger under controlled conditions, that is, as long as we are
disciplined, undergo training, and use good equipment. Moreover, we are
attracted to the cultures of deviance they sustain. Skate boarding, extreme
biking, and windsurfing have offered participants alternative worlds in which
social obligations -- to hold a job, go to school, marry, listen to one’s
teachers, and raise children -- seem unimportant. The famous aerialist,
Philippe Petit, who walked between the two Twin Towers in New York City’s
financial district, saw himself as a rebel and artist. He did not seek
permission to walk, but instead trained for the event on the sly by avoiding
guards, reaching the top disguised in a work-shirt and helmet, and hiding his
equipment in a trolley. In his autobiographical account of his escapade he
writes, “By the time I turn eighteen I’ve been expelled from five schools for
practicing the art of the pickpocket on my teachers and the art of card manipulation
under my desk. I refuse to take the basic exam to prove I can read, write and
count, and thereby jeopardize my chances of landing a job picking up garbage or
operating a cash register.” This link between risk and deviance, is a common
one. Abraham Zaleznik, a theorist of leadership, once proposed that the
entrepreneur and the juvenile delinquent share the same psychology. Similarly,
when hedge fund traders cut corners by trading on inside information we presume
that they are simply motivated by greed or fear. But as risk takers they are
already deviants and feel further aroused by breaking the law. Much of popular
culture, represented in films, television and novels, is based on the premise
that the life of an outlaw is exciting.
Wallenda,
however is not readily categorized. In interviews he presents as a very
responsible person, motivated partly by his family heritage-- he comes from a
long line of tightrope walkers—and grateful to God for his talent. He is
anything but reckless. Asked before his walk if he was taking too big a risk, he
noted that, “I’ve got three children and a wife. And if I thought there was even a small chance of me losing my life
Sunday, I wouldn't be doing it." Should the wind buffet him, or the cable
oscillate, he would simply, “lower myself to the wire and cling to it, waiting
to be rescued.”
While walking across the gorge he said, “Thank you
Jesus,” many times, but he does not believe that “God keeps me on the wire.” “I
believe God gives me a unique ability to walk the wire, but it's up to me whether
I train properly. There are a lot of people that have amazing relationships
with Christ that lose their lives in a car accident. Does that mean they didn't
have a good enough relationship with Jesus? No. Life happens and God created us
all in his image, but we're all our own people. We're not robots. We make
decisions. So I don't think that I'm testing God.” This statement points to a
thoughtful and generous humility. Even as he can speak to God, God does not
watch over him. Moreover, he is no deviant. The Federal government did not give
him permission to walk across the land inside the boundary of the Grand Canyon
national park, so he sought and got permission to walk over land that was part
of a Navajo reservation.
But Wallenda thanking
Jesus does point to an important dimension of courting danger and taking risks.
Sports psychologists note that extreme sports participants often experience a
moment of “sublime awareness” in which they experience the world’s majesty and
their small place in it. A hang glider writes in a
blog that, “for me hang gliding is the ultimate in achieving union with the
forces of nature, immersion within them. Gravity, wind, lift, sink, these are
all invisible and exploiting them to savor for a few minutes requires
understanding of physics, sensory acuity, and various types of
reasoning….Unfettered movement in three dimension with only the sound of wind
in the ears is fantastic. Flying close to hawks and eagles, flying with them,
is beyond description. (http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=15838)
One
hypothesis is that such sublime experiences result from the sports person’s calm
or low arousal state while in the moment of performance. A skilled participant
is highly aroused, feeling a mix up of both anxiety and excitement, both before and after his performance, but remains supremely calm and focused during
it. We can understand this by drawing on Freud's concept of "sublimation," the way in which sexual feelings are “sublimated” through
the process of creating a beautiful poem or painting. He meant that when the
artist creates something beautiful, he invests it with her love, and hopes that
her audience will love it in turn. That is why artists often refer to their
creations, at the moment they let them go, as their “babies.” In this same way
of thinking we can say that the extreme-sports participant sublimates his
excitement and anxiety, transforming these feelings into a sense of awe. This
experience of awe, while at first arousing, is then calming; arousing because he experiences the majesty of his surrounding or setting, calming because he realizes what a small and limited part he can possibly play in shaping it.
One has no choice” but to “go with the flow.” The resulting
focus on the present moment enables the participant to attend to the tasks of
navigating obstacles without distraction.
A recently published
study of 370 adults aged 19 to 103 found what wise people have known for a long
time, that our biggest regrets are for risks not taken. One researcher on the
study notes that, “as people rise higher in our culture, there is a perception
of greater opportunities. Paradoxically, the more opportunities you have, the
more ways you can see how you could have gotten more . . . Opportunity fuels
the regret experience." (http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/brain-and-behavior/articles/2011/06/29/when-americans-think-of-regrets-love-tops-list). Yet
much of the academic and popular discourse about risk today, is about threats;
from nature, technologies, and our own irresponsible behavior, for example in
global warming discourse. One school of academic thought even elevates the experience
of “dread” as central to our experience of risk. Yet Steven Pinker, the MIT
psychologist and linguist, argues strikingly in, The Better Angels of our Nature, that the level of interpersonal
violence throughout the world had declined across the centuries, decades and
years. In the United States the homicide rate today is as low as it was in the
peaceful 1950’s. The question is why this discrepancy between discourse and
experience? Why the focus on risks imposed rather than risks not taken?
Freud's famous essay, Civilization
and its Discontents provides a clue. Freud suggested that we accept our obligations, and
the guilt we feel when we are tempted to violate them, because in the end
civilization offers us security in return. His pessimism was based on the idea
that as civilization advances, it enmeshes us even more, intensifying the guilt
we feel for simply dreaming of escape. Perhaps the conviction that each
person’s carbon footprint is destructive is one curious expression of Freud’s
prediction. To consume, in others words, to pleasure oneself, is to destroy.
One hypothesis is that we face a new and compelling tension
today between the empathy we feel for the lives of others- Pinker believes this
is one reason violence has declined – and the individual opportunities we believe are
almost within our grasp. How does a culture express this tension, and support
our ability to face it rather than evade it? Perhaps Wallenda does provide one
model. He is man who takes significant risks, but does so within a matrix of
attachment to his lineage, love for this family and subordination to God. What
are some other models?
P.S. I recommend looking at the YouTube video of free soloing- rock climbing without ropes, as an emotional doorway into these issues.
P.S. I recommend looking at the YouTube video of free soloing- rock climbing without ropes, as an emotional doorway into these issues.
