Exuberance: The Passion for Life (34 page)

Many who are not exuberant are wary of those who exhibit unbridled enthusiasm, not only because of their insensitivity to personal and social history, but because their interests are strewn so widely as to be diffuse, themeless, and shallow. Exuberants, they believe, are easily excited—magpies who swoop down on glittering things—but lack the discipline or capacity to discriminate the meaningful from the superficial. Christopher Irmscher, in
The Poetics of Natural History
, makes this point about the ever-exuberant P. T. Barnum. Barnum’s museum, hugely successful with the public, brimmed over with items that had caught Barnum’s enthusiastic eye over the years—more than 100,000 “curiosities”: a snuffbox made out of bits of the pulpit used by John Knox; a dried mermaid; the head of a fossil elk; anacondas; a Chinese summer tea house; a mammoth ox; and a “curious mortuary memorial” to Washington and Lincoln, which was ten feet high and made from more than two million seashells. But, as Irmscher notes, “
[t]he principle of Barnum’s museum is the profusion of sights, not the achievement of insight into a predetermined order of things.” Even recurrent themes, he observes, “point less to an order intrinsic to the collection than to a meaning superimposed on it by the avuncular collector.” An exuberant temperament by no means leads inevitably, or even usually, to shallowness, but the potential is there. Subtleties and sustained thought can be lost in a swirl of vivacious moods and energies, just as monomaniacal enthusiasm can limit awareness of and sensitivity to the perspectives, needs, and contributions of other people.

The exuberant brain is a hopping, electric place, a breeding
ground for both invention and rashness. It is by nature impatient, certain, and high on itself; inclined to action rather than reflection; overpromising; and susceptible to dangerous rushes of adrenaline. The exuberant mind is also disinclined to detail, error prone, and vulnerable to seduction. All people, said Walter Bagehot, are most credulous when they are most happy; for someone who is exuberant, self-deception is just the next mountain over from credulousness. All seems possible, much seems essential, and unwarranted optimism feels fully warranted. Self-deception can then move, by conscious intent or not, into the deception of others. (“It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world,” said the Earl of Balfour, “that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.”)

However scamming or unsustainable the promise, we are easily swept up by contagious enthusiasm. People will gladly suspend disbelief for sizzle, dash, and a chance of escape. P. T. Barnum knew this to his marrow, as did Meredith Willson when he created the character of Professor Harold Hill, the razzler-dazzler of
The Music Man
. A traveling salesman who lives off the unrealized dreams of others, Hill sprinkles bright bursts of color over the drab of life and promises the undeliverable. He sweeps into River City and convinces the town, thanks to his verve and their credulousness, that without a boys’ band, which he assures them he can provide (though he has no intention of doing so), its young people are headed straight to hell (“
Ya got trouble, folks, right here in River City. Trouble, with a capital ‘T’ and that rhymes with ‘P’ and that stands for pool!”). Hill, like Barnum, is exuberant and charismatic, “a bang beat, bell-ringin’, big haul, great go, neck-or-nothin, rip roarin’, ever’time-a-bull’s eye salesman.” (The “fella sells bands. Boys Bands,” explains one of his competitors, “I don’t know how he does it but he lives like a king, and he dallies and he gathers, and he plucks and he shines and when the man dances, certainly, boys, what else: the piper pays him.”)
The Music Man
captures the dupability
of a town in need of pizzazz, as well as the persuasive powers of exuberance—“I spark, I fizz”—but it also makes clear the desire of the audience to suspend its own disbelief and to be persuaded, for an evening, that love can transfuse character into a con man, to believe that the exuberance to which they have responded is more than empty promise and undelivered dreams.

Reason takes a particular holiday when it comes to financial schemes and crazes. “
Not only fools but quite a lot of other people are recurrently separated from their money in the moment of speculative euphoria,” writes John Kenneth Galbraith in
A Short History of Financial Euphoria
. Such “recurrent speculative insanity,” he believes, follows a predictable course: “
Some artifact or some development, seemingly new and desirable—tulips in Holland, gold in Louisiana, real estate in Florida, the superb economic designs of Ronald Reagan—captures the financial mind or perhaps, more accurately, what so passes. The price of the object of speculation goes up.… This increase and the prospect attract new buyers; the new buyers assure a further increase. Yet more are attracted; yet more buy; the increase continues.… Something, it matters little what—although it will always be much debated—triggers the ultimate reversal. Those who had been riding the upward wave decide now is the time to get out.” The bubble bursts; disaster follows. Built into such speculative episodes, Galbraith asserts, is euphoria, “
the mass escape from reality, that excludes any serious contemplation of the true nature of what is taking place.” Such “irrational exuberance,” a term made famous by Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan in a 1996 talk about the stock market, is defined by the Yale economist Robert Shiller as “
wishful thinking on the part of investors that blinds us to the truth of our situation.”

In the high-flying world of boom, bubble, and bust, no speculative mania has been more dazzling than that for the tulip, a
seventeenth-century mania that truly blinded investors to truth. Neither the first nor the last flower to incite preposterous financial trading—hyacinths and ranunculus and gladioli have had their day; a single dahlia was exchanged for a diamond in nineteenth-century France; red spider lilies set off a speculative craze as recently as 1985 in China, where, according to the historian Mike Dash, the most desirable lilies sold for prices “
equivalent to no less than three hundred times the annual earnings of the typical Chinese university graduate”—but nothing has claimed the public’s imagination like the Dutch tulip hysteria.

Charles MacKay, in
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
, wrote about tulip mania, among other all-consuming enthusiasms: “
In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.” And, he remarks: “
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

The passion for tulips was remarkable. People sold their houses and other possessions in order to invest in tulip bulbs; eventually, tulips were themselves used as cash. The “aberrant enthusiasm,” as Galbraith would have it, spread like a fever, and to a degree unimaginable. But why the tulip? It has neither the perfume nor the beauty of the rose, MacKay noted, and lacks the beauty of the sweet pea. But it does have variegation—“
the world can’t show a dye but here has place,” he quotes one poet—although any particular variation’s beauty, growers soon found, was singularly difficult to perpetuate. Such trouble in cultivation together with the tulip’s
beauty, MacKay believed, were at the heart of the rising wave of irrational purchase and investment: “
Many persons grow insensibly attached to that which gives them a great deal of trouble,” he observed dryly. “Upon that same principle we must account for the unmerited encomia lavished upon these fragile blossoms.” Anna Pavord, writing 150 years later in her book
The Tulip
, makes a similar point.
The fact that the flower could “break,” that is, change color unpredictably and often magnificently, added to the tulip’s allure. Only rarely would these broken, multicolored flowers, which were also the most extravagantly bought and traded, promulgate a like variation. The breaks were caused by an aphid-spread virus, which, because it weakened the flower, sowed further uncertainty.

How irrational did the tulip mania become? Abraham Munting, a Dutch horticulturist who wrote a contemporaneous account of the tulip craze, records that at one point
a single bulb was exchanged for twenty-four tons of wheat, forty-eight tons of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tons of beer, two tons of butter, a thousand pounds of cheese, one bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver drinking cup.
A lone bulb of “Semper Augustus,” the most glorious and renowned tulip, traded for a sum that, according to Mike Dash, would feed, clothe, and house an entire Dutch family for half a lifetime, or be sufficient to purchase one of the “grandest homes on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam for cash, complete with a coach house and an eighty-foot garden.” Beauty was indeed beyond rubies.

Such insanity could not and did not last. Gradually people cottoned on to the reality that their speculation was built on sand, or at best the soil of the Dutch tulip fields, and, as the comprehension spread, prices inevitably dropped; then they plummeted. The tulips returned to being objects of beauty, no longer ones of folly.

The dangers of unchecked enthusiasms go beyond irrational financial behavior. The haste and vehemence of exuberance can
trample reason and lay siege to the truth. Sinclair Lewis’s young doctor, Martin Arrowsmith, irritated by the vapid exuberance of his colleague, Dr. Pickerbaugh, exclaims, “
I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts,” and rails against Pickerbaugh’s superficial science and relentlessly excited but hollow public-health crusades, noting how justifiably bored the public would be at “
being galvanized into a new saving of the world once a fortnight.” Not enough, perhaps, separates crusade from tirade and intense enthusiasm from fanaticism. Recklessness springs naturally from overoptimism. Left to its own highly persuasive devices, exultant mood will nearly always trump rational thought. It is in the amalgam of fever and reason that genius lies. Passions are like fire and water, observed the journalist Sir Roger L’Estrange more than three hundred years ago: they are good servants but poor masters. Passion kept on a loose bit serves its master far better than if it is left unbridled. Brakes are necessary; the exuberant mind must preserve the capacity to take a dispassionate measure of itself and the object of its zeal. When it does not, the consequences can be devastating.

Exuberance becomes dangerous when the goal is reprehensible, the means suspect, or the delight indiscriminate. Enthusiasts may be more interested in the problem to be solved than in the ethical issues which obtain in the wake of a solution. The Australian physicist Sir Mark Oliphant, who worked on the atomic bomb and then expressed severe misgivings about it, commented, “
I learned during the war that if you pay people well and the work’s exciting they’ll work on anything. There’s no difficulty getting doctors to work on biological warfare, chemists to work on chemical warfare and physicists to work on nuclear warfare.” Curiosity and enthusiasm can be put to terrible ends.

Richard Feynman, who worked on the Manhattan Project, candidly related his delight on hearing about the atomic bomb
explosion over Hiroshima: “
The only reaction that I remember—perhaps I was blinded by my own reaction—was a very considerable elation and excitement, and there were parties and people got drunk.… I was involved with this happy thing and also drinking and drunk and playing drums sitting on the hood of … a Jeep and playing drums with excitement running all over Los Alamos at the same time as people were dying and struggling in Hiroshima.”

Feynman’s response is disturbing, complex, and more understandable than one would like: he and his colleagues, many of them exuberant by temperament, had been working single-mindedly on an intellectually fascinating problem; the atomic bomb, they believed, would end the war quickly, and they knew it was imperative to develop the technology before the Germans did. The scientists had been living and working together for years, walled off from the rest of society, completely focused on science and the success or failure of their project. The achievement of their goal would have been far less likely had they not been as enthusiastic and committed as they were. Still, Feynman’s unabashed delight is unnerving; more than anyone in the world, he and his fellow scientists knew the devastation they wrought on Hiroshima.

“
All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some direction,” concluded William James. War uniquely provokes such passions. Madame de Staël, a great proponent of enthusiasm, wrote that war “
always affords some of the enjoyments of enthusiasm.… The martial music, the neighing of the steeds, the roar of the cannon, the multitude of soldiers clothed in the same colors, moved by the same desire, assembled around the same banners, inspire an emotion capable of triumphing over that instinct which would preserve existence; and so strong is this enjoyment, that neither fatigues, nor sufferings, nor dangers, can withdraw the soul from it. Whoever has once led this life loves no other.” Robert E. Lee said simply, with the perspective of someone
who had been there, “
It is well that war is so terrible: we should grow too fond of it.”

Paul Fussell, in
The Great War and Modern Memory
, describes war as a baptismal experience holding the possibility of resurrection, “
a transformation of the personality.”
It is for some a romantic quest filled, as Eric Auerbach observed, with miracles and danger rituals and enchantment; but war is also, in Tennyson’s words,
a “blood-red blossom with a heart of fire.” At its most intense, war is a complex mesh of emotions and behaviors sustained at fever pitch: fear and rage, atrocity, madness, exultation, shame, and courage.