This theory is at least as old as 1966, when sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff proposed it:
Religious Man, who lived according to belief in transcendent principles that ordered human life around communal purposes, had given way to Psychological Man, who believed there was no transcendent order and that life's purpose was to find one's way experimentally. Man also no longer understood himself to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey, but as a tourist who traveled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness as this ultimate goal.
....Rieff saw, however, that you could not have culture without cult--that is, without shared belief in and submission to a sacred order, what you get is an "anti-culture." An anti-culture is inherently unstable, said Rieff, but he doubted that people brought up in this social order would ever be willing to return to the old ways. (page 11-12).
Never mind the rest of society, I can certainly tell a tale of Religious Man and Psychological Man (or Woman) existing in tension within myself. I would describe myself as meaning and purpose-driven. Nothing scares me like the thought of being irrelevant and useless. The need to do something meaningful is the main motivation for me to push out of my comfort zone and face the many anxieties and fears that I have felt throughout my life. I also observed that the broader culture, outside of my family, did not exactly encourage this search for meaning. Perhaps it did not openly discourage it, but the emphasis was on dreams, wishes and "finding myself," not on finding out where I could most contribute. I found out the hard way that my dreams and wishes were mostly nonsense (and often not even mine, but imitations), that other people's approval didn't necessarily mean I was doing the right thing, and that the only way forward was to face my fears. Running away always caused the fears to multiply; facing them meant occasionally overcoming them, and also discovering new things to be afraid of, which at least made life more interesting.
The word "interesting" is key, because another thing I learned quite early is that I could bear almost anything as long as I saw my life as a heroic story that ultimately had meaning. Alice Munro summed it up with one of my favourite quotes: "Learning to survive, no matter with what cravenness and caution, what shocks and forebodings, is not the same as being miserable. It is much more interesting." This is also the root of the curiosity and compassion I feel for others. People are interesting. We are so muddled, and so full of conflicts, and always fall short of any ideal we set for ourselves or others. But everybody has a story to tell, and why not tell your story and listen to the stories of others? In many ways, I am still the child who sat on the bumper of the van on summer nights with my brothers, telling and retelling and acting out fairy tales and made up tales.
However, Dreher argues that in society, the therapeutic is the controlling force.
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