There is nothing worse for men than wandering. – Loren Eiseley
Despite its unprecedented wealth and affluence the modern West is blighted by epidemic levels of mental illness, loneliness, social disconnectedness, identity diffusion, and meaninglessness. Marked by rampant consumerism and addiction, a burgeoning culture of narcissism continues to undermine once-venerated social norms and hasten erosion of our cultural and spiritual roots.
Western Plague
Over the jangling commotion of modern life seems to hover a fugitive sense of emptiness – of something missing. Even ostensibly happy and successful people are increasingly haunted by lack of deep satisfaction and genuine fulfilment.
The West’s profound malaise is reflected in an increasing variety of psychological and spiritual troubles. Millions of lives are now blighted by multiple woundings: loneliness, anxiety, depression, lack of meaning and purpose, poor self-esteem, substance abuse, addiction, family breakdown, mental illness, and a host of kindred afflictions that are the seemingly intractable scourges of modern life.
Contemporary patterns of mental illness highlight the dire state of our collective psychological health and emotional wellbeing. The West is stricken with an epidemic of mental illness so far-reaching it constitutes a modern plague.
Prevalence rates have risen dramatically over recent decades. In 1955 one in every 468 adult Americans was hospitalised for mental illness; by 1987 this had risen to one in 184, then soared to one in 76 by 2007. In the USA, the number of people disabled by mental illness in 2007 was six times greater than in 1955. Mental illness has reached staggering levels in children, the number severely disabled increasing thirty-five fold over the past two decades, making it the leading cause of childhood disability.
Anxiety and neuroticism in adults and children have risen dramatically. By the 1980s average American children suffered more anxiety than did child psychiatric patients in the 1950s. More people visit doctors for anxiety than colds. Now ten times more common than at the turn of the twentieth century, depression has become a leading cause of disability worldwide.
Alarming as they are, these facts are but the tip of an iceberg of vast and growing proportions.
Inventing Loneliness
Epidemic levels of anxiety and depression might be causally related to conditions prevailing within the broader sociocultural environment. Widespread destruction of communities, erosion of traditional lifestyles, political and economic instability, sectarian violence, terrorism, and looming ecological catastrophe are only a few of the host of stressors to which millions are now routinely exposed.
Decreasing social interconnectedness has been posited as a major contributor to escalating anxiety.
The lives of many are now blighted by the spectre of loneliness. International research indicates one in four people regularly feel lonely and many more complain of being constantly lonely.
Current trends indicate loneliness will reach epidemic levels by 2030. Recognising one in five adults feel lonely most or all of the time, in 2018 Britain appointed a Minister for Loneliness. Other nations are sure to follow.
Despite unprecedented affluence, Westerners are more prone than ever before to feelings of alienation, emptiness, aimlessness and unworthiness. How can this be? In addition to well-recognised psychosocial stressors mentioned above are others peculiar to the modern West but routinely overlooked due to their encompassing nature, nebulous character, and kaleidoscopic variety of often quite subtle effects.
What, in particular, have been the social, psychological and spiritual repercussions of the increasingly volatile psychic climate provoked by the momentous cultural, religious, philosophical, and scientific changes discussed in preceding chapters?
Consequences Unforeseen
Collectively we no longer believe in absolute knowledge or incontestable values. The sacred traditions of our ancestors have all but disappeared and venerable secular traditions are rapidly following suit. What is left for us that is constant and reliable? In sharp contrast to the common experience of our forebears, we dwell in a world of incessant and unremitting change, flux, and ambiguity which, know it or not, affects us deeply on many levels.
“So many long-established traditions have broken down – traditions of family and social life, of government, of economic order, and of religious belief.”
“There seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.”
“To some this a welcome release from the restraints of moral, social, and spiritual dogma. To others it is a dangerous and terrifying breach with reason and sanity, tending to plunge human life into hopeless chaos.”
Where has humankind’s irrevocable “fall from grace” left us? Scholar of religious studies Huston Smith identifies loss of transcendence as a defining characteristic of modernity:
“The sense of the sacred has declined; phrases like ‘the death of God’ and ‘eclipse of God’ would have been inconceivable in earlier days. This is a real loss; fading of the belief we live in an ordered universe that is related to other, unseen realms of order in a total harmony cannot but have serious consequences.”
The West’s rapid and unprecedented cultural change has imbued the modern world with a toxic and unstable psychic atmosphere inimical to healthy human development. How does this world appear to a child’s eyes? Jungian psychologist James Hillman traces the distress increasingly evident in children to the dire state of the world that surrounds them:
“Archaic peoples and tribal communities offered their children constancy, an unlimited timespan of continuities. Our main myth is apocalyptic. Children today live among and act out images of catastrophe. Of course suicide among children shows a startling rise. How troubling it must be for a child to tie its star to a collapsing structure of depletion, extinction, and loss that cannot be repaired.”
Anxiety is but one of many possible reactions to the disconcerting conditions of contemporary life. How could we not be troubled when in our hearts ever resides haunting awareness of our plight and plaintive longing for safe and solid ground on which to stand?
Oracle of Desire
A sense of emptiness and disconnection suffuses the lives of many Westerners, leading to the desperate embrace of unbridled individualism and self-obsession. Disoriented and alone in a cosmos seemingly bereft of human meaning, cut off from inner sources of spiritual sustenance or any secure foundation on which to base authentic identity and enduring meaning and purpose, countless numbers fall into a self-perpetuating cycle of insatiable craving and consumption.
Driven by a compulsive urge to quell inner emptiness, and seduced by promises we can – and should – have everything we want, we are urged to indulge every whim: “Our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is now the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us.”
Autonomy, freedom of choice, and unrestrained indulgence have come to be considered inalienable rights. Bombarded by ubiquitous advertising designed to promote consumption as the surest route to happiness and fulfilment, many now feel free to live as they want, unconstrained by religious, cultural, or ethical restriction.
Mesmerised by tantalising images of the latest “must-have” possessions and numbed by the infantile distraction of popular entertainment, the promise of instant and unlimited pleasure seduce vast numbers into greedy consumption and narcissistic self-absorption.
Owning and consuming have become prime concerns of many. In subordinating human existence to property, having has overwhelmed being. While the founders of Western civilisation saw the “perfection of man” as the true and noble goal of human existence, the modern West is now obsessed with perfection of image and accumulation of possessions.
Soul Sickness
Disoriented by nihilism’s erosion of guiding values and shaken by existentialism’s spectre of meaninglessness, many now cling to life while increasingly prone to losing conviction in its ultimate value. Many seem to have resigned themselves to accepting their lives have no higher meaning or purpose. Is a meaningful life even possible in a universe deemed “meaningless”?
Psychologist Abraham Maslow believed frustration, denial and suppression of our inherent human nature was a prime cause of illness and that many varieties of mental disorder could be understood as a consequence of loss of direction and purpose and therefore to be essentially spiritual in nature.
The “ultimate disease” of our time, Maslow maintained, is valuelessness.
In consequence, he felt, “Human and personal possibilities have been lost. The world has been narrowed, and so has consciousness. Capacities have been inhibited.”
Jung concluded “lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend.” Observing that many of his patients did not have any clinical illness but were suffering the “senselessness and aimlessness of their lives”, Jung stated: “I should not object if this were called the general neurosis of our age.”
Lack of meaning in life often plays a causal role in the genesis of mental disorders like anxiety and depression, Jung claimed. Such conditions reflect the “suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl feared loss of direction and purpose increasingly evident among modern Westerners could soon become entrenched: “No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; soon he will not know what he wants to do.”
King Without A Country
The core of human identity – a stable, enduring sense of self – was lost amid the shifting ground and shaking foundations of modernity. Its absence impels an interminable quest for security: “When the ultimate basis of our world is in question, we run to different holes in the ground; we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations. We attempt to live in castles that can only be in the air, because there is no firm ground in the social cosmos on which to build. Priest and physician are both witness to this state of affairs.”
Lacking a secure, culturally-validated identity and without an authoritative guide for acquiring one, contemporary human beings are largely free – and indeed obliged – to construct their own. This unprecedented situation offers limitless opportunity for self-determination:
“People are free to determine what kind of self they will have, what kind of people they will be. People are free to be selfish or selfless, nasty or nice, serious or frivolous, and they are free to change the selves they have as they see fit. Selves are like shirts. One can discard old ones and invent new ones.”
Given the disorienting range of freedoms available, how are we to decide what foundations to build upon and which blueprint to follow in fashioning a unique identity? What is the likely outcome were idiosyncratic desire and arbitrary whim to become our only guides? In the absence of higher allegiances or the guidance of an over-arching social narrative, such an undertaking is tantamount to building on shifting sand.
Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard likened an individual who constructs his own identity to a “king without a country”: such people lack a crucial element – some eternally firm basis on which to establish an abiding sense of self.
Lack of such secure foundations results in a semi-stable personality fraught with disharmony and prone to fragmentation. How could such people not be at risk of succumbing to anxiety, depression and a host of other problems – even of losing themselves altogether?
Empty Mirror
In 1980 Christopher Lasch identified advent of a culture of narcissism in Western society. Loss of confidence in the future and erosion of social connectedness had galvanised the rise of narcissism: “Since ‘the society’ has no future, it makes sense to live only for the moment, to fix our eyes on our own ‘private performance’, to become connoisseurs of our own decadence, to cultivate a ‘transcendental self-attention.’” This trend has continued to grow exponentially ever since, especially among younger persons.
Unrestrained self-centred individualism that is a hallmark of modern free-market societies readily degenerates into narcissism as people are urged to do whatever their feelings, desires, and impulses dictate, regardless of the consequences or the feelings and wishes of others.
Driven by their overblown sense of self-regard, narcissistic individuals often go to great lengths to ensure they feel – and are perceived to be – different, special and unique. The modern-day proliferation of idiosyncratic personal names, prominent tattoos and piercings, and flamboyant embrace of deviant or eccentric styles of dress, behaviour and belief may be seen as expressions of the narcissism of small differences – affectations many now rely on to distinguish themselves from others while concealing their essential uniformity and sameness.
Spurred by a yawning void within, the desperate quest for a secure self-image has culminated in a strikingly simplistic answer to the West’s three-hundred-year-long identity crisis: “The self is the modern substitute for the soul.”
Digital Narcissus
Of the many changes the world has seen over the past two decades arguably the most profound and far-reaching has been advent of the internet and, in its train, rapid proliferation of various forms of social media which have comprehensively infiltrated our lives on every level.
Smartphones have brought an entire generation to the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades, claims psychologist Jean Twenge: “The twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives – and making them seriously unhappy.” Anxiety, depression, social isolation, poor social skills, emotional immaturity, low self-esteem, and suicide can be directly linked to excessive smartphone use, says Twenge.
The “new normal” is an increasingly isolative one.
Instead of speaking to people it has become common to dash off a text; rather than meeting in person it is easier to post selected images to Instagram or Facebook.
Gadgets promising to facilitate connection have fostered anti-social behaviour on a massive scale. “I think we like our phones more than we like actual people”, one of Twenge’s teenage subjects confided.
The more time people spend on screen-based activities the lonelier and more unhappy they become. Young peoples’ social development is also compromised. “In the next decade we may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression”, Twenge ominously predicts.
The internet has transformed “the age of the world picture” (Chapter Two) into “the age of the self picture”. A peculiarly modern phenomenon, “selfies” are a symptom of our narcissistic times. People visiting sites of great natural beauty or cultural significance once took unadorned photos as mementos of the experience. Mindless acts of self-obsession reveal what many now feel is a more impressive sight: glancing at the ostensible reason for their visit just long enough to judge the perfect camera angle, they blithely turn away, thus reducing it to an incidental backdrop to grinning and posturing images of themselves.
Carefully curated self-images have become an ambivalent obsession for an entire generation of young Westerners, especially girls. Desperately craving acceptance or, better, adulation, some fall under the spell of their own self-created persona: “The Self feels itself to be and is nothing but a fetishized commodity, an image, a collection of masks, something to be produced for and consumed in the glittering spectacle of life.”
Monkey Mind
“Digital addiction”, a phenomenon unique to our era, has altered our behaviour and social landscape in a host of unanticipated ways. What is incessant checking, scrolling, clicking, and watching doing to our psychology, identity, and way of being in the world?
Prolonged immersion in the ever-changing barrage of internet or social media can scatter the user’s attention in myriad directions over and over again, leaving them unfocused and ungrounded.
We are sinking in digital quicksand with scant awareness of the risks. Constant distraction by phone calls, texts, emails, social media alerts, and news feeds has reduced the average human attention span to around eight seconds: shorter than that of goldfish! Attention deficit disorders have reached epidemic levels. While children are more often diagnosed with such conditions, many adults now have similar problems. Who does not have some kind of attention deficit in these hyper-stimulated times?
Though allowing their mind to wander randomly with little effort to differentiate trivial and significant has become a regular indulgence for many, psychological studies reveal a sobering fact – a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
Contemplative traditions developed and perfected various mind-training practices such as meditation to help people acquire greater mental control and enhance self-awareness.
Belated recognition of the value of this traditional wisdom is reflected in growing interest in the cultivation of mindfulness as a way of reducing stress, promoting emotional wellbeing, and enhancing mental clarity and efficiency. By contrast, long periods of trance-like absorption in digital media are a mass uncontrolled experiment in mindlessness and distraction for untold millions.
Never Alone
Solitude also plays a vital role in human development and emotional wellbeing. Adolescents who spend moderate amounts of time alone are better adjusted than those rarely or never alone. Those who are regularly alone experience more positive emotional states, are less depressed, feel less self-conscious, and have improved concentration.
Religious and spiritual traditions commonly advocate regular periods of voluntary retreat from the outer world to create space for self-nurturing activities like prayer, meditation, study, and reflection. Creative individuals often tell how solitude heightens their receptivity to inspiration, imagination, and novel ideas.
Crowded out by the relentless demands of work, the frantic pace of modern life, and ubiquitous digital technologies, voluntary solitude has become increasingly rare in Western culture. Smartphones and other devices now ensure people are always connected and available.
According to one recent survey, when they find themselves unoccupied the first thing most 18-to-24-year-olds do is reach for their phone.
Being alone is profoundly challenging for those whose sense of self is dependent on the constant presence and reassurance of others. Portable digital devices have made aloneness easy to avoid – many have become adept at promptly screening it out.
Though they may be physically by themselves, the presence of these seductive devices means ever fewer people now take the opportunity to simply be with themselves for a time.
For many, the prospect of cutting the digital umbilical cord may provoke such dread some believe it amounts to an anxiety disorder unique to the modern era. A recent Australian survey found 99% of smartphone users experienced some degree of “nomophobia” (no-mobile-phone-phobia).
The deep emotional attachment many feel for their phones points to a graver concern: the extent to which people become dependent on them to define and validate their identity and sense of self. Deprived of this connection even briefly, such people feel adrift, alone with a distressing sense of having lost some vital part of themselves. Who am I when my phone is switched off?
André Gide’s observation is especially pertinent in our era of constant connection: “Fear of finding oneself alone – that is what they suffer from – and so they don’t find themselves at all.”
“Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude,” observed theologian Paul Tillich. Flight from solitude extracts a high price. Abraham Maslow believed many people are now “experientially empty” as a result of having lost the ability to hear the inner signals he regarded as “voices of the real self”.
No longer able to stand in the glory of their unique human identity, many are now compelled to turn to outer sources for reassurance. “He is unconscious of himself, he does not know who he is, he lacks a sense of identity and so turns outward to gain that reflection of himself he cannot achieve inwardly, alone.”
Broken Cup
The catastrophic consequences that befall indigenous peoples following loss of their traditional lifestyle and spiritual perspective are reflected in the burgeoning incidence, in diverse groups throughout the world, of physical and mental illness, premature death, aimlessness, loss of hope, crime, violence, poverty, substance abuse, anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide.
Anthropologist Ruth Benedict has described the sorrows of Ramon, a Californian Digger Indian as he reflects on what once was and is no more:
“In the beginning God gave every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life. They all dipped in the water, but their cups were different. Our cup is broken now. It has passed away.”
Might affluent modern Western societies have more in common with uprooted traditional societies than we generally realise? That advanced industrial societies are increasingly prone to endemic problems disconcertingly similar to those that blight marginalised native populations is reason for pause. The “Western plague” referred to at the start of this chapter – involving rampant occurrence of mental illnesses like depression and anxiety – is merely the tip of a vast iceberg of mental, physical, and spiritual problems.
The modern West is shadowed by the ever-deepening spectre of disorientation, rootlessness, loneliness, alienation, and despair with no obvious solution. Embrace of scientific materialism has resulted in comprehensive desacralisation of the cosmos and transformed the abode of Western civilisation into an entirely profane realm. This traumatic loss of coordinates has had profound consequences: “No true orientation is now possible … there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves.”
We find ourselves in an age in which, if they have not disappeared altogether, spiritual and transcendent realms and values have faded into the background of human awareness and concern. This absence has impoverished our view of life and diminished our sense of what it means to be human.
Recommended Reading
- C.G. Jung Modern Man in Search of a Soul
- Abraham Maslow The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
- Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement
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