Two movies that gave me pause for thought in the past six months have been V for Vendetta and Children of Men. Both movies attempt to contextualise violence within a future somewhat near to the present reality of western life today. Government and societal power structures have lost the ability to serve, and today perpetuate a new vision of broken and fragmented humanity. The anti-heroes of both movies have moved beyond saviour status and instead reflect broken, wounded men, striving to make some sense of the times and situations they find themselves in. At the expense of being a little too profound I hereby attempt a synthesis of some of my reading over the past six years.
The instant now society, gives people little chance of honouring or accomodating deeper desires. Spirituality has been sublimated into the excesses of a consumer driven society, fearful of the possibility of terrorist attack. People increasingly choose to hide inside suburbia, with bigger and larger LCD screens watching the world unfold somewhere out there, or otherwise drop down the rabbit hole into simulations such as Second Life.
Peoples minds, psyche and spirit are increasingly battered by the pace of modern life, and normality is no longer identifiable. Human beings are identified as being innately violent across various disciplines: from the pop psychology of I'm Ok, you're OK, to the bad parenting theories of Alice Miller, to the fracturing of relationships espoused by Carol Gilligan and Robin Morgan, The 'evolutionary' need for aggression taught by Lorenz and Morris, to Ellacurias' comments on the need to defend property. Weber saw State relationships as an initiator. Rene Girard postulates mimesis and scapegoating as integral. Foucault and
Alison have attempted to nuance the place of sexuality within society and church as a pre-cursor of violence. Naturally one could argue that religion used to moderate base desire, but now the floodgates are open and desire becomes destructive. Interestingly society points the finger at the church and the abuse in indiginous communities rather than address the increasing violence in personal relationships in mainstream society.
This increasing violence is more and more typified by the breakup of relationships. Family law statistics reveal that over 65% of cases involve defacto couples, with drug and alcohol related problems almost present in 100% of cases. People are hurting and cannot anymore solve their problems without litigation. Increasingly, married couples too are finding the all pervasive violence too much to cope with, and retreat into solitude to lick their wounds and foster the rampant consumerism. The domestic GDP benefits so much from the increase in house building and the necesarry increase in the sales of white goods and electronics to set up another household.
Peter Black calls us to seek attributes of the erotic, after
Gafni:
intensity: an antidote to superficiality and passive aggression,
pleasurable common to both the erotic and the experience of the holy,
being present to the
infinity of the moment, the other as subject not object.
radical giving and receiving;
the defining of self discovering the self through intimacy with the other;
overcoming alienation, as each opens up to the Other and
engagement of the creative imagination. All calling one to seek the other, not to pay another to find oneself.
Daniel Bell and also
Carrette and King note that the need for counselling and therapy has become another consumer product. I identify with them that
New Age capitalism's overriding characteristic is the hawking of “personalised packages of meaning . . . rather than offering recipes for social change and identification with others.” Suffering has not been conquered, rather capitalism and consumerism have co-opted the new age.
Gail Bell has written on the worried well, the depression epidemic and the medicalisation of our sorrows. Whilst I have some sympathy with the radical orthodoxy movement and appreciate that relaxation is inducive to salvation, I find solace more in
Henri Nouwen who challenges us to move downward and find security in less, not more. I recommend his "Selfless Way of Christ."
After the brain dump yesterday I find myself somewhat sated intellectually. On the eve of another anniversary I find much solace in quotes from yesteryear:
