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.
