A Statement of the Problem

There is a Crisis

“One gets the feeling some spiritual catastrophe has taken place…” – Leonard Cohen.

In some ways, life is getting better and better. In one important way it seems to be getting worse: in the experience of what is called “mental illness.” Current National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) data state that 46.4% of Americans have or will have some form of “mental illness” (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/1ANYDIS_ADULT.shtml). One in four, one quarter of us, is mentally ill in any given year.

Very little is really known by the science called psychology about this thing called “mental illness.” I’ve been watching the field long enough to realize that the things we know one year turn out to be untrue by ten or twenty years later. We seem to be running around in circles on this. What causes mental illness? Do the pills work? Do the new pills work better than the old pills? What is the most common form of mental illness? Is mental illness A really distinct from mental illness B, or are they two symptoms for the same malady? And is the incidence of such things growing?

We don’t know. We don't know. We don't know. The entire field seems permanently behind a shroud, uncanny and mysterious.

All we are really sure about is that a lot of people claim to be suffering a lot.

My own sense is that the incidence really has been growing, rapidly, at least in the developed world. I find it hard to believe that, a hundred or two hundred years ago, nearly half the population was suffering from what we now call mental illness, and nobody noticed anything in particular. Albeit it does not seem to attract the attention it deserves today either.

Perhaps the true experts on all this are the artists. Artists, I expect, detect the zeitgeist well before the rest of us do, because they are more sensitive to such things; like the proverbial canary in the mine. And Leonard Cohen is far from the only artist to proclaim some sort of broad social or cultural breakdown—a “spiritual catastrophe.”

Duchamp's "Fountain"

Artists have been saying this with remarkable persistence at least since Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917), WB Yeats’ “The Second Coming” (1919), and TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), the three great original landmarks of “modernism”: things have fallen apart, everything has died, the culture is in broken shards. Some artists have celebrated this fact, and some have lamented it, but all seem to have been saying the same thing ever since: “I saw the best minds of my generation ruined by madness.”

So what has happened over the last hundred years?

What is the Cause of this Crisis?

The obvious immediate cause of the crisis reflected in Eliot’s and Yeats’s great poems was the First Word War and the revolutions that followed it—most notably the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Yet this is not sufficient explanation, since this spiritual crisis clearly is still with us now. It has long ago gotten downright tedious: what is “Piss Christ” saying that Marcel Duchamp's “Fountain” was not already saying a century ago? Yet the Great War is now several wars ago, and the Bolshevik regime has faded into history. There must be a deeper cause behind this proximate cause.

Piss Christ

Nor is this deeper cause, I think, hidden. It is the philosophical tendency called “Modernism”—the label commonly applied to these three artistic works.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the term “Modernism” as it is modernly understood was coined by a professor M. Perin at the University of Louvain, in 1881. He defines the term, primarily, as “the ambition to eliminate God from all social life” (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10415a.htm).

That is a Catholic viewpoint, and a negative definition. Perhaps it is clearer if we invert it: Modernism was and is the ambition to inject science into all social life. The Modernists of philosophy, seeing the success of science and technology in the Industrial Revolution, wanted to set society, too, on a proper scientific foundation.

Wikipedia elucidates, in its entry on Modernism: “Two of the most significant thinkers of the period were, in biology, Charles Darwin, and in political science, Karl Marx” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism). Darwin was publicly an agnostic. “Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined the religious certainty of the general public.” “The notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as ‘lower animals’ proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality.” Marx’s atheism was open and strident: “religion is the opiate of the people,” and all our thoughts are entirely conditioned by the economic system. Both doctrines proposed, essentially for the first time, that “science” and “religion” were opposed systems.

Planet of the Apes?

Both theories were promptly applied to society, indeed were designed to be applied to society, on the notion that society and culture could now be run on an efficient, “scientific” basis. Bad idea. People are not cogs. Marx gave us the Bolsheviks; Darwin gave us the Fascists.

The tendency to view society and humans as machines was then exacerbated by the influence of Einstein and Freud. Mussolini, for example, appealed directly to Einstein. If, as Einstein said, the foundations of the physical world were uncertain, “relative,” then the doctrines that guide our thoughts and deeds were also “relative,” and everything was up for grabs. All norms were expendable as proved convenient—in practice, especially moral norms. The very same argument is, of course, still made by the postmodernists.

Freud, in turn, claimed that “All subjective reality was based … on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism). We could not perceive objective reality, if any existed; we were animals driven entirely by instincts.

I think one can see the appeal of this doctrine. If God does not exist, there is no moral law. If there is no moral law, I can do as I please. Whoopie! Cue the Jazz Age!

More or less literally, all hell broke loose.

Now of course, it looks rather reactionary, rather hindwards-looking, to suggest that we have been on the wrong course for the past century. Heck, that makes me a Victorian. I am, for example, quite explicitly, calling for the abandonment of all “social science.” Sorry about that. I do not think the Victorian times were a golden age. Their overconfidence in the perfectability of man and society largely led to this. But I submit that some such backtracking is necessary and progressive in the true sense: there is nothing discreditable in pulling your finger out of an electrical socket. Since we went off on this Modernist path, we have actually lost all confidence of social or cultural progress. We now imagine that all of civilization has been a mistake, the past ten thousand years or so, and the feral Na'vi and their real-life hunter-gatherer counterparts are the folks who had it right.

Damned inconvenient that they so often have such unfortunate habits as slavery, infanticide, cannibalism, and constant war.

Is this only a problem of “Western civilization”? It appears not. Eastern Europe and Japan seem at least as subject to suicides and “mental illness”; one suspects China is too. Africa, the Muslim world, and perhaps India may have held out somewhat better so far, but they also seem to be undergoing a major trauma on this point. The fight against modernism is a useful prism through which to understand the rise of “Islamism,” for example.

The objection to modernism is not, note, an objection to science. Quite the reverse. The scientific claims of Marx and Freud have long ago been exploded; nobody who believes in science should have anything more to do with their ideas. Einstein, in turn, right or wrong, was simply misinterpreted by the social and cultural relativists. Darwin alone seems problematic—that debate is too complex to dive into here.

But there is a broader point. What we call science is fundamentally based on observation—in other words, what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. The human soul, by definition, cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched, and neither can God. The application of scientific method to the human realm or to the divine, therefore, is exactly as nonsensical as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Nor does the fact that science can tell us nothing useful about the human soul or the meaning of life mean that there is no human soul and no meaning to life—any more than trying to hammer in a nail with a knitting needle, and failing, proves there is no way to hammer in a nail. Yet that is the silly Scylla and Charybdis we have caught ourselves in.