Desire and Hydras

                From childhood onward, we are all deeply acquainted with the problems of unsatisfied desire. Though we do not remember it, surely as infants we were all hungry and could not feed ourselves, cold and unable to warm ourselves, lost and afraid without the means to comfort ourselves. As we grow older, our desires become more complex, more various, more particular and less universal. Yet the basic problem remains always and ever the same. We find ourselves wanting what we cannot have, or at least what we cannot provide for ourselves. Constantly bombarded by desires too great, too small, too confused ever to be fully satisfied, we start to doubt that we really want what we think we want.

                But we humans are nothing if not clever creatures. We decide that we want to do something, to conquer the world, say, or put a man on the moon. We know we might not really want these things, but we also know that a life without a goal is the most terrifying of all possibilities. So we strategize, become subtle, we grow ever more and infinitely clever. We find happiness in our action with a purpose. And yet…

                Some doubt grows in our minds, a fear that all this subtle planning amounts to nothing more than a recipe to disappoint ourselves all the more. We've lived long enough to know that no desire, however great, can endure too much satisfaction. How many of us have had some favorite cereal that we ate every day for a month, only to wake one morning to find that the slightest taste of it sours our stomach? What changed, we wonder. What indeed.

                Desire is a hydra, a beast that grows two hungry mouths for every head we cut off, yet disappears unaccountably as soon as it has eaten. How to fight such a monster? Is it enough for us to drive it from one spot to another, keep it running from goal to goal, deferred pleasure to deferred pleasure? Is it even, if you’ll pardon the word… desirable? Or does this approach only lift us up to drop us all the further, to crush us all the better?

                There’s nothing surprising, I suppose, in the fact that all of the world’s great spiritual traditions have offered their own remedies to the problems of desire. Though I could go on endlessly about all the various prescriptions these traditions offer, today I’ll limit myself to two of them, Buddhism and Christianity, for two reasons. The first reason is that I have had a more sustained interest and engagement with these two traditions than with the others. The second is that the remedies these two offer seem to me so fundamentally opposed.

                The Buddha tells us that the problem of life is suffering, and that the cure for suffering is to put an end to desire. Convince the hydra that it is only hungry because it has become attached to the pleasure of eating, and the beast will stop eating. Once it has stopped, it will soon starve, leaving us peacefully non-attached.

                Good and well, says Christianity, but your goal is all wrong. For the Christian, it seems that Buddhism has hit on precisely the wrong problem. Suffering comes from desire, certainly, but what if there were a way to direct that desire fruitfully, to turn suffering and desire toward a greater good? The Christian does not view suffering as an overwhelming problem, is fairly well-disposed towards pain, may even enjoy it a little bit. The Christian is out to find comfort and solace in suffering, not an escape from it. So the Christian answer to the problem of suffering is quite different: rather than an end to desire, Christianity seeks to cultivate an infinite desire infinitely deferred. Thus is born the image of life as a long pilgrimage towards God, and the promise of the Kingdom of Heaven in the hereafter. If we can tame the hydra, says the Christian, we can ride on its back into an infinite horizon.

                I must say, I have no clear idea what people mean when they call themselves Christian Buddhists or Buddhist Christians. To my ears, that sounds almost as if they told me they wanted to see the bottom of the ocean from the peak of Mount Everest. Both are wonderful destinations, of course, but hardly fit to be combined.

                Here in America, I think we tend even now to lean towards the Christian view of things. Would our advertisements work quite so well if they weren't directed at a society that had become accustomed to centuries of the sort of vigorously Puritan self-denial that allowed it to span a continent? Isn’t there a secret underside to our consumer society, where it runs less from our real desire to consume than from the guilt and shame we love to feel at the thought of our being mere consumers? Ever noted the odd mix of shame and pleasure in your friend’s voice as they told you about their recent Netflix binge? And what’s really going on when someone “ironically” listens to pop music?

                Have we Americans found a new answer to the problem of desire: the infinitely deferred desire to defer an infinite desire infinitely?