Man Turned in on Himself, excerpt 7

Anxiety
The DSM-IV criteria for anxiety disorder includes “at least six months of excessive worry,” “tension, fatigue, trouble concentrating, sleeplessness,” and “clinically significant distress functioning in daily life.” Merriam Webster includes in the definition for anxiety, “doubt concerning the reality and nature of the threat and . . . self-doubt about one’s capacity to cope with it.” Soren Kierkegaard—whose existential philosophy focuses on how one lives as a “single individual” —uses metaphor to express the truths of anxiety:

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit . . . looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness.”

Pastor Robert W. Kellemen, by contrast, claims that anxiety is simply “fear without faith.” Each of these definitions provides insight into this alarming trend in American mental illness. Since 1980, reported anxiety disorders in the U.S. have increased 1,200%. A 1994 study, which asked a random sample of thousands of Americans about their mental health, revealed 15% who’d suffered from anxiety disorders. Fifteen years later, a similar study found nearly half of the sample—as many as 117 million U.S. adults—had experienced at some point anxiety severe enough to meet the standards for a disorder. Of particular concern for the nation’s future well-being are several studies that reveal “a significant increase in anxiety levels in children and college students.” This is compared to the emotional well-being of kids, teens, and young adults fifty years ago. “If progress is measured in the mental health and happiness of young people, then we have been going backward at least since the early 1950s.”

There might be any number of explanations for why America’s youth might find the world more overwhelming than in the “good ‘ol days.” Before we succumb to the rose-colored lens of nostalgia, consider this: rates of anxiety and depression in young people were far lower during The Great Depression, World War II, The Cold War, and the tumultuous periods of social change of the 1960s and early 70s than they are today. Closer examination reveals that America’s increasingly anxious young people are not the by-product of “realistic dangers and uncertainties” in a global society, nor do they correlate with economic cycles, wars, or life-changing world events. The clearest evidence seems to suggest that children and college-aged students are more anxious than ever because they have lost the essential belief that they are in control of their own destinies. Dr. Jean Twenge observes that “Generation Me”—those born in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s —may be “tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious” but they are also “cynical, depressed, lonely, and anxious.” Growing up in the mall, and in a “bling-saturated” media culture, they could not help but develop a disordered desire for “stuff.” Coming to terms with just how much the latest “stuff” costs, as well as being on the receiving end of relentless messaging about the type of education and career success that is expected of them, has created a seismic undercurrent for anxiety. Perhaps that’s why, during the coming-of-age periods for these generations, there was a marked shift from intrinsic to extrinsic goals:

“Intrinsic goals are those that have to do with one’s own development as a person—such as becoming competent in endeavors of one’s choosing and developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Extrinsic goals . . . are those that have to do with material rewards and other people’s judgments. They include goals of high income, status, and good looks . . . young people today are, on average, more oriented toward extrinsic goals and less oriented toward intrinsic goals than they were in the past.”

How is it that focusing on extrinsic goals has made young people feel less in control and more anxious? Twenge suggests this line of thinking: “To the extent that my emotional sense of satisfaction comes from progress toward intrinsic goals I can control my emotional well-being. To the extent that my satisfaction comes from others’ judgments and rewards, I have much less control over my emotional state.”

In the language of homo incurvatus in se we would say that a disordered desire for admiration, power, wealth, success or desirability—extrinsic goals— leads one to “turn in” on a warped path of self. Although the term “intrinsic goal” may sound more like the action of turning inward, what it actually represents is turning one’s ear toward an understanding of who one is and what one believes, namely, to focus one’s development such that he “will know the truth and the truth will set them free” (John 7: 32 NRSV). This process of coming to know one’s true self rarely follows the strict “test-taking, GPA-boosting, resume-building timetable” that extrinsic benchmarks require. Time spent with friends relaxing means time not spent cramming for an AP exam. Taking up an activity such as skateboarding or hiking or gardening—without the “admissions bump” of being the president of the club or including underprivileged kids in the mix—becomes a luxury for the truly goal-oriented young adult.

But ambition is nothing new. Why then would 21st-century Americans—young and old alike—find it bringing them to such an anxious state? The answer would appear to be two-fold.

1) We’ve come to equate our extrinsic goals with the pursuit of happiness:

“As soon as an American baby is born, its parents enter into an implicit contractual obligation to answer any question about their hopes for their tiny offspring’s future with the words: “I don’t care, as long as he’s happy” (the mental suffix “at Harvard” must remain unspoken). Happiness in America has become the overachiever’s ultimate trophy. A vicious trump card, it outranks professional achievement and social success, family, friendship and even love. Its invocation can deftly minimize others’ achievements (“Well, I suppose she has the perfect job and a gorgeous husband, but is she really happy?”) and take the shine off our own.” (Ruth Whippman, NY Times)

Part of the blame can be placed on the self-esteem movement that swept the nation in the final years of the 20th century, creating whole households chanting the mantra, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” —based on no evidence whatsoever. Where once a child who was underachieving, unpopular, unruly, or obnoxious faced painful, instructive, real-time consequences, the remedy of choice for modern children was a booster shot of self-esteem. Referring to the 2010 PISA results, which assess 15-year olds worldwide, Paul E. Peterson, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance noted that in mathematics, “the U.S. ranks number 1 in self-esteem and number 32 in performance.” Faced with a zero-sum college or job market, “specialness” is sorely tested. When it is finally revealed that a grown child is lacking in the skills, attributes, or wherewithal to be The Best (and the parents’ raison d’etre has not turned out as spectacularly as they had hoped), anxiety is inevitable:

“This obsessive, driven, relentless pursuit [of happiness] is a characteristically American struggle—the exhausting daily application of the Declaration of Independence. . . . Despite being the richest nation on earth, the United States is, according to the World Health Organization, by a wide margin, also the most anxious. . . . America’s precocious levels of anxiety are not just happening in spite of the great national happiness rat race, but also perhaps, because of it.” (Whippman)

2) We’ve taken God out of the equation

In doing so, we have robbed ourselves and our children of the security of knowing our place in the world. Kierkegaard, the father of “existential angst,” often uses the words from the Gospel of Matthew 16:26: “‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lost his own soul?’ To lose ourselves is to wound our soul . . . That which we forget [or lose] is precisely that which anxiety reveals: that we are a self with the task of becoming ourselves.”

From RECLAIMING THE WISDOM OF HOMO INCURVATUS IN SE: “MAN TURNED IN ON HIMSELF” AS AN ENTRY POINT FOR THE DISCUSSION OF SIN IN 21ST-CENTURY AMERICA by Heather Choate Davis

Man Turned in on Himself, excerpt 6

Promiscuity, consumerism, obesity, narcissism, apathy, greed—these are just a few of the obvious displays of homo incurvatus in se in 21st-century America. These behaviors—or the consequences of them—are visible and often public. Even apathy is on display by the very lack of people showing up to meet a given need. But from a pastoral or evangelistic perspective, attempting to point to any one of these behaviors as “sin,” quickly becomes a case of “Do not judge someone because they sin differently than you.” One man’s Armani suit is another’s pound of fudge. And besides, the accused will snap, “who is it hurting?” This common deflection reveals what C.S. Lewis began noting as early as 1940: modern man has lost all sense that his sinful behavior is worthy of God’s wrath. That internalized check-and-balance between one’s behavior and the Creator’s response has been phased out by one hundred years where “we have so concentrated on one of the virtues—kindness or mercy—that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. . . . The real trouble is that ‘kindness’ is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that ‘his heart is in the right place’ and ‘he wouldn’t hurt a fly’, though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature.” (From The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis)

As a result of our obliviousness to sin, “Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—in itself very bad news—before it can win a hearing for the cure.” The diagnosis might be helped along by looking more closely at three of the shockingly common individual— and often hidden— sufferings that plague the modern American in the 21st century: anxiety, depression, and a disordered relationship to technology. Whether alone or in combination, these conditions are often at the heart of—or, in the case of technology, undergirding—the more overt expressions of homo incurvatus in se such as promiscuity, addiction, gluttony, consumerism, and greed.

In the sub-sections to follow, consideration will be given to each of these three conditions and how they relate to homo incurvatus in se in the following ways: 1) Man turns away from God and toward his own desires because he wants to be his own God. Now, if he were the only soul on earth—as his (and our) narcissism often deludes him into thinking— this problem would be manageable. But a world filled with creatures each trying to be his own God quickly leads to chaos: if everyone is in charge, no one is in charge. This ever-mutating, self-created chaos “bounces back” to the modern man in the form of increasing anxiety and depression. 2) Our self-centeredness turns our fellow man into our competition. “If, being cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow creature great mischief, that is only because your neighbor’s welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease. Every vice leads to cruelty.” (Lewis) This “zero-sum” mentality leads to greater distrust, which, in turn, “justifies” our curving ever more inward. 3) We are social creatures in a world that now feels chaotic and untrustworthy. We therefore create “safe” and undemanding simulations of community for ourselves through technology. Online we can all be our own Gods (we can even imagine we’ve recreated the “bonds of kinship”) as the virtual/digital life pulls us deeper into the “journey homeward to habitual self.” With that, we now look more closely at anxiety, depression, and our disordered relationship to technology.

Man Turned in on Himself, excerpt 5

How The Modern American Turns In On Himself: A Brief Overview

Were Augustine to walk through malls of America he would come face to face with concupiscentia gone amok. Such is our disordered desire for “lower things.” Shoes and purses and berry-scented balms; entertainment systems that overshadow our ordinary lives with escapist fantasies; toys purchased in such abundance that larger homes are needed with playrooms just to store them; the blessings of a day of gratitude scrapped for the frenzy of consumerism known, ironically, as Black Friday. Making good on Tocqueville’s vision of souls glutting on “petty and banal pleasures,” Americans were predicted to spend over $370 million on 2012’s Halloween costumes— for their pets!

Move along to the mall’s Food Court, and one is faced with three separate manifestations of homo incurvatus in se in relationship to the basic human need to eat. 1) Obesity. America is by far the most obese nation in the world. In 2012, 35.7% of adults and 16.5% of children were considered obese. Defenses about genetics, medical conditions, and poor neighborhood options will only go so far until one is left with the simple truth: many in the United States have a disordered desire for food. 2) Eating Disorders. While some can’t seem to eat enough, 10 million plus American women—mainly teenagers— are starving themselves in the hopes of creating a body more like the media ideal, a body that will look better in the tight jeans they see at the mall. This disordered desire for an idealized physical perfection perpetually turns people in on their own obsession and away from the simple pleasures of enjoying food with family and friends. 3) Hunger. While many have the option of eating too much or too little, nearly 15% of U.S. households were food insecure at least some time during the year. This may or may not reflect any sort of incurvature of their own, but it clearly reflects a society that has curved away from its weaker members. “If liberals underestimate the motivating power of self-interest, conservatives underestimate sin—the selfishness that curbs the altruism needed to care for the poor.” This selfishness is an offshoot of the disordered desire for wealth and creature comforts—better known as greed—which fuels and is then refueled by greedy social structures e.g. “tax laws that favor large corporations” and “the breathtaking salaries of CEOs.” As disordered desire knows no limits—and if society refuses to set them—“unseemly” displays become the new standard:

“Unseemliness is television producer Aaron Spelling building a house of 56,500 square feet and 123 rooms. Unseemliness is Henry McKinnell, the CEO of Pfizer, getting a $99 million golden parachute and an $82 million pension after a tenure that saw Pfizer’s share price plunge. They did nothing illegal. . . . But the outcomes were inappropriate for time or place, not suited to the circumstances.”

“The heart wants what the heart wants,” Americans shrug, as if desire is its own entitlement. And how could they not? In the 1990s, there was little talk of the common good or being “thy brother’s keeper” in the public space. Rather, individualistic psychologists had begun classifying people who nurtured troubled friends or family members as having the psychological disorder of being co-dependent and encouraged Americans to value their own needs, desires, and personal interests over all else —these were the keys to high self-esteem and a happy, successful life.

For many, it seems, their greatest desire was for sex—unrestricted and consequence-free. Where our earliest forefathers would have started the day with The Lord’s Prayer, by 1969—the end of the decade that launched The Pill —the “cult prayer” of America was this

I do my thing, and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.

“Claiming to be wise, they became fools”(Romans 1:22 NRSV). “For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions” (Romans 1:26 NRSV). And so the era of “if it feels good, do it” gave birth to a new generation. Unprepared to pass on any abiding wisdom about love, sex, or commitment, these “free love” adults went on to raise children without the cultural norms of “waiting for marriage” or what “good girls don’t” do. Their children then grew and had kids of their own, the lessons of accepted and enforced Judeo-Christian morality now two generations removed from the common culture. The country founded on religious freedom was now a place where people had no choice but to live in a world of their own curved-in creation—a world where people did what they pleased and lived in “terrifying isolation.” If some remnant of an individual’s God-given nature began to tug at him with pangs of shame or whispers of Original truth—one that included responsibility, morality, and the greater good—pop psychology quickly assuaged him: Don’t worry, be happy!*

*Not surprisingly, we even took this pop phrase out of its original spiritual context. The quote is taken from the Indian mystic, Meher Baba, whose full expression included both personal responsibility and a divine master—“Do your best. Then, don’t worry; be happy in My love. I will help you.”

From RECLAIMING THE WISDOM OF HOMO INCURVATUS IN SE:“MAN TURNED IN ON HIMSELF” AS AN ENTRY POINT FOR THE DISCUSSION OF SIN IN 21ST-CENTURY AMERICA by Heather Choate Davis

Man Turned In on Himself, excerpt 4

Homo Incurvatus in Se in the 21st-Century American Individual

When the Puritan John Winthrop set foot on American soil in 1630, he proclaimed, “we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoys together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body.”

By 1772, the focus of the colonies had shifted to one of equal rights and the good life for all, with Ben Franklin declaring that in New England “every man” is a property owner, “has a Vote in public Affairs, lives in a tidy, warm House, has plenty of good Food and Fuel, with whole clothes from Head to Foot, the Manufacture perhaps of his own family.” By the time our forefathers drafted the Declaration of Independence, the political system bore little resemblance to Winthrop’s communal “city upon the hill.” The document’s most defining line asserted the unalienable rights of the individual and set the stage for America to become the most individualistic culture in the world. Fifty-plus years later, the term individualism was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville to express the mindset unique to the new American democracy. He described a “calm and considered feeling that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends: with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself . . . such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.”

Although the Declaration of Independence acknowledges a Creator, there seems to be little reference to the Divine plan for the “tie of kinship” that Augustine described, or Winthrop had hoped for. There is surely no hint of the spirit Luther expressed when he said the Divine call was to love one’s neighbor more than oneself. In fact, if Tocqueville’s assessments were correct, America’s claim as a Christian nation would be most accurate in the sense that it is a nation of Christian sinners, turned in on its own individual desires and empowered by law to pursue those desires to the full. With the same certainty that St. Paul writes, “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23 NRSV), Tocqueville predicted that a future built on such “radical individualism” can only lead to a nation of people “constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest.”

Despite the great gifts of initiative and creativity that an individualistic culture can yield, the very real downside is a citizen trained “to think of all things in terms of himself and to prefer himself to all.” And so, with E Pluribus Unum on its seal and homo incurvatus in se in its heart, America grew up, making its choice of masters.

From RECLAIMING THE WISDOM OF HOMO INCURVATUS IN SE: “MAN TURNED IN ON HIMSELF” AS AN ENTRY POINT FOR THE DISCUSSION OF SIN IN 21ST-CENTURY AMERICA by Heather Choate Davis

Easter baskets, God, and Graham

Today I am dropping my son Graham off at the airport for a 12-day business trip— an amazing adventure and work opportunity rolled into one. I’m so happy for him. But I’m also keenly aware that this will be the first Easter in 23 years that we have not celebrated all together as a family. It marks a moment where from here on in, perhaps, things like the family being together are no longer in my control.

I’ve learned a lot about what is and isn’t in our control over the years. Now, as I near the final weeks of my MA Theology program, I smile to see the distance I have traveled in my faith since the early years with my children. To celebrate, I thought I’d revisit a passage from Baptism by Fire:

It was bedtime, just before Easter, just after my thwarted phone conversation with the man from the church who would not let me fake it —not this time—when I found myself making preparations. I reached for The Picture Bible on Graham’s shelf. It had been a baptismal gift and was as yet uncracked.

“You know, honey, maybe it’s time to learn a little bit about Easter.”

“I know all about Easter. The bunny brings a basket and hides it. Remember last year it was in the shower?”

“Yes, but it has other meanings. There are other parts of it,” I said as I fumbled with the book, thumbing blindly. Where exactly is the part about Easter? Why don’t they have this thing indexed by holiday?

“So what’s the other part?” Graham asked matter-of-factly.

“Well,” I said, looking up from the book and winging it, “you know about god and the angels?”

“They’re up in heaven, with Uncle Michael.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Well, the other thing is that what a lot of people believe is that god had a son named Jesus. And that, um, the story of Easter is that Jesus—” Jesus what? What’s the story of Easter? Oh, yeah, died on the cross, buried, ascended —shit, I can’t tell him that. “Let’s just say that Jesus was a really smart guy with a lot of ideas about god and how people were supposed to love each other and stuff, and some people didn’t like what he had to say, so they, well, they didn’t want him around anymore.”

“Why didn’t they like his ideas?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did they do to him?”

“Well, they killed him.”

“He’s dead?”

“No, actually, I mean … well, the big part of the story is that after he died, he came back—”

“He wasn’t really dead?”

I had just recently gotten him to understand that when people die they are dead; they don’t come back, not ever. “Well, it’s kind of complicated, but anyhow, people were really glad to see him again, and, I think we’ll save the rest for when you’re a little bit older.”

(from Baptism by Fire: The True Story of a Mother who finds Faith during her Daughter’s Darkest Hour, pp 35-36)

Wishing you all a blessed Holy Week. And my dear son Godspeed.
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