We Can't Go On Like This

It’s been pointed out all over the place in 2017: this is the first time in worldwide human history that obesity is a bigger problem than starvation, more people die of old age than from infectious diseases, and people who commit suicide outnumber those killed in all the wars, terrorist acts and violent crimes combined.

The LA Times ran an interview with a filmmaker last Sunday, who said something about “these profoundly dark times…” and I had to wonder, as I often do when I often hear people say things like that, “WTF is she talking about?” Maybe it’s an ignorance of history thing. It mentioned that she was 38, which means she was born the same year I started college at Stony Brook. In those days unemployment was about double what it is now, inflation was like quadruple, violent crime rates were the highest for the last 60 or 70 years. I remember mentioning AIDS to a friend in Ohio, and she said, “that’s the disease that old Jewish people get, right?” In New York City, the Dakota was black, Trinity Church was black, all the subway cars were covered inside and out with graffiti (which at least was not all black). I assumed they were supposed to be like that. I have no idea what Times Square looked like because nobody went there unless they wanted to score drugs and/or get mugged.

But the thing that struck me most about my first year back in college was the way every conversation about the future was marked by the same caveat.

“In 15 or 20 years, if we’re all still around…”

“In the future, if we haven’t blown ourselves to bits…”

“The next generation or two, provided anyone survives the nuclear holocaust…”

And this was a couple of years before Jonathan Schell’s Pulitzer winning book “The Fate of The Earth”, a reasoned scholarly analysis of the likelihood and possible aftermath of nuclear war between the US and the USSR which deteriorated repeatedly into a rant that was essentially “OMG we are going to fucking obliterate humanity!”

Those were dark times. Too dark even to be profound.

Did I mention the garbage strike in NYC? Not only dark, but stinky were those times.

So what is wrong with these times? What’s wrong with living longer and healthier than ever? Is it somehow bad that worldwide poverty has been cut in half in the last 20 years? Is their something evil and scary about the fact that crime rates everywhere have trended downward for almost 40 years?

Okay, yes, we might could go to war with North Korea, which has a few nukes and coupla ICBMs, but hasn’t yet figured out how to combine the two. In the eighties the US and USSR could wipe out all civilization with a fraction of their waiting nukes; as Winnie Churchill said “the rest would just make the rubble bounce.”

And yes, too many people still don’t have the rights they should have and aren’t treated fairly as they should be. But would they want to go back to the way things were 40 years ago, or 100 years ago?

Yes, there have been 7,500 tragic, unnecessary American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 16 years. Is that worse than roughly 60,000 deaths in the 10 years of the Vietnam war. Or 400,000 deaths in 4 years of WWII. 700,000 in the Civil War.

In short, the vast majority of everyone you’ll ever meet today is healthier, wealthier, safer and happier than they likely would have been in any other period in history. I refer you again to Steven Pinker’s book “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, the reading of which should be a universal prerequisite to getting an internet connection.

So why has the suicide rate in the United States surged to the highest levels in 30 years? Why are the best-selling prescription drugs all antidepressants? Why are so many people scared or angry or hopeless? Are these times really that dark?

Yes. Yes they are. Because while scientists and doctors and yes even politicians have made our material life better in the last couple of centuries, our spiritual world has been swirling down the toilet. Our religions are burnt-out husks of ancient spiritual guidance systems. Our so-called spiritual leaders hopelessly cling to these failed institutions, but they have no idea how to help us connect to the Divine. The people know this, and they are abandoning traditional religions in droves.

The fastest growing “religion” in the US is “spiritual but not religious”. NOT Atheists, agnostics, secularists, humanists. The vast majority of Americans still believe in a higher power, but they have no idea what it is or where it is or how to connect to it, or even what to call it.

The ills of our time are all spiritual ills. Greed, pride, prejudice, fear, hatred, hopelessness. These things don’t happen around spiritually healthy, truly Spirit-centered souls. These things are killing us. We can’t go on like this.

So what can we do? I’ll tell you. Check back on Labor Day 2017 for Part 2.

A Spirit-Centered Life is a Life Without Fear

"And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?" Jesus asked, right in the middle of the sermon on the mount.

There's an excellent article in The Atlantic: Surviving Anxiety by the magazine's editor Scott Stossel, in which he chronicles his life-long battle with anxieties, fears, and phobias. He boldly describes several embarassing incidents, as well as encounters or relationships with varied and numerous therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and institutions. The list of medications he has tried or is currently taking, plus therapies he's attempted (or been subjected to) is absolutely mind-boggling.

The one thing he didn't mention trying was a truly spiritual path. Prayer and meditation are embedded in a long list of therapies, but I have to wonder if he ever made a serious attempt to connect with and seek guidance from the Divine. He talks briefly about his family's religious heritage; his father's parents were German Jews who came to the US before World War II, his mother a proud Mayflower descendant wasp, so he and his sister were raised Episcopal -- pretty much guaranteeing they would never come anywhere near a true metaphysical encounter with the Divine. 

I think this is a good time to bring up Ken Wilber's AQAL concept: he said he was having trouble tying together all his (end everyone else's) theories about life, love, society, religion, science, etc., until he drew a big cross, creating four quadrants. He put Interior(subjective) on the left, Exterior (objective) on the right, Individual at the top and Collective at the bottom. Every human endeavor you can think of fits somewhere on this simple grid. Individual/Collective is pretty self-explanatory. Exterior refers to anything that can be seen, touched or measured; Interior is something less tangible, whose nature and state can only be determined by asking about it.

So let's say you go for a physical. The nurse measures your height, weight, blood pressure; these are all Individual/Exterior/Upper Right qualities. Maybe you took the subway from your apartment building to the doctor's office in a skyscraper downtown; your home, mode of transport, and the office tower are all Collective/Exterior/Lower Right accomplishments. The doctor asks how you feel; he can't measure this directly, he has to ask. So your answer --- happy, depressed, anxious, or (crucially for this blog) spiritually ill --- falls in the Individual/Interior/Upper Left quadrant. He mentions that he really likes some new sitcom that's on TV tonight, it's a big hit. This is a lower left Collective/Interior item, which Wilber describes as "cultural" (so maybe a TV show was not a good example); point is, it's a collective endeavour because a bunch of people watch it, it's interior because they have to poll people to find out if it's popular. He asks if you like it. You say yes. This is an upper left Individual /Interior lie; you really think it's stupid, which is exactly why science hates dealing with anything on the left side of this chart. There are no instruments that can tell how happy or depressed someone is, it's really difficult to know when people are lying, thus it's pretty much impossible to predict whether a movie or show will be a hit.

My takeaway from Wilber's writings is always that science has dominated human thought and progress for the last couple of centuries. Psychologists have tried to create a science to deal with the upper left quadrant, with the result that "We've Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World's Getting Worse" as the famous Jungian James Hillman titled his book back in 1992. And if the measure of scientific theory is in the results it can produce, Scott Stossel's experience is an undeniable condemnation of our efforts to understand the Individual/Interior part of lives.

Yet, the upper left quadrant -- Individual/Interior -- is precisely where our connection to the Divine happens. How can we lead a balanced, healthy life if we ignore the very thing that northwest-pointing arrow is actually pointing at?

From Mathew 6:

 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?

28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.