Peripheral Visions

another level brings about damaging change. Withdrawal from a drug is a little like an autoimmune disease, the self-estrangement of a system no longer recognizing itself, and the symptoms of some kinds of withdrawal look curiously like allergies. Alcoholics drink to feel right, to feel like themselves. Sober, they encounter uncomfortable strangers in their own skins, and pouring a drink feels like coming home; their bodies have learned to regard the presence of alcohol as a natural state and adjusted to it.
    Chemical addiction is the result of a kind of bodily learning; the learning of ideas also produces a kind of addiction. All views of the world are acquired, and learning a way of seeing the world offers both insight and blindness, usually at the same time. Losing the certainty of a particular worldview can make you feel sick, bewildered, dizzy. From this point of view, culture shock is a withdrawal phenomenon; we reject the new because we have learned to be dependent on the old. In the same way, I may learn to trust someone, premising my life on that trust, and then be unable to reject it when I am betrayed. People will accept martyrdom in order to hold on to an idea.
    Sometimes those who have learned to need a particular substance or behavior have learned to need a constant change in the supply, overcoming the adaptive effect of habituation. This need for a constant change develops in some forms of alcohol and heroin use, defining what feels normal. The American economy is addicted to increases in the gross national product, for growth has come to be regarded as the only stable state of a modern economy. Anorexics must get thinner and thinner in order to feel slim; more and more missiles are needed in order to feel secure; pornography must become progressively more horrendous to continue to titillate. Treatments of addiction like methadone or daily attendance at AA meetings are also in a way addictive, but they make sense if they involve replacing an escalating need with a stable one that carries a reduced cost. Perhaps all pleasures that do not bring a natural satiety have an addictive potential. Once money is invented, wealth seems to become addictive, for the wealthy are never rich enough. “Rich” is apparently not a continuity; “richer” is. The present leverages the future.
    It is fashionable today to speak of behaviors that used to be regarded as good or evil as addictions: gambling, sex, work, all those behaviors that the person feels compelled to pursue and that may come to seem dysfunctional. No choice, no morality. Yet the moral judgment survives under the clinical veneer in that we do not often speak of couples contentedly and prosperously married as mutually addicted, and we are just beginning to speak of the more respectable substance addictions in those terms. Even those who are proudly free from addictions to morning coffee or afternoon tea are likely to be committed to such learned constancies as jogging or a morning shower or moving their bowels at a particular time, all behaviors that become virtually a part of self-definition by long conditioning. Where is one to draw the line in a thicket of metaphors that both illuminate and confuse? We might do better to see a relationship between addictions and commitments and teach children not so much to avoid addiction as to choose their addictions carefully. Dental floss yes, laxatives no.
    The constancies of modern life are increasingly the products of technology: we depend on an information-rich environment, on constant entertainment, on air-conditioning. Some kinds of resistance have been lost, so we have come to require clean drinking water. In a real breakdown of technology, our withdrawal symptoms would kill us. In postwar Iraq, illness and death spread as the society struggled for self-regulation. Some of the constancies we have come to expect, like medical care and increased longevity, are dangerously cumulative. Sometimes, however, a constant in society affects the individual as a violent discontinuity—losing a job is no less painful when economists speak of acceptable levels of unemployment. Sometimes we blame individuals when society is the addict: Who after all really is addicted to crack cocaine? Where is the addiction in the system? What constancies does it maintain?
    From the point of view of composing a life or managing an institution, the ability to recognize any situation as representing both continuity and change makes it