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The following essay was published in the Concord Monitor 7/27/16
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| Reflections in a Dover Store window: 7/17/16 CC Jean Stimmell |
Reflections from back in time
Reflecting back
on my youthful days as a card-carrying member of the 1960s counterculture, I
remember being taken aback by a provocative statement by one of my professors:
he declared that looking back through European history, people were happiest
during the Middle Ages.
He was referring to the ideas of Eric Fromm,
psychoanalyst and social critic, who wrote that while people in that era lacked
individual freedom, they had ultimate security as to who they were, what their
place in society was, and what their purpose in life was, both while alive and
in the hereafter. Out of that security came contentment.
Despite – or
more likely because of – the crazy era I
came to age in, this idea stuck with me. While I certainly didn’t want to trade
places with a peasant or stone mason from the Middle Ages, I was acutely aware
of the immense weight of anxiety and stress bearing down on my frail shoulders,
attempting to survive in ultra-individualistic America.
It fell upon me,
and me alone, to design my own life, determine the purpose of my existence, and
then endeavor to follow through on my goals in the effervescent flux of an
ever-changing world. There were no
immutable standards to measure myself against: Any doubts I harbored over
whether I was succeeding or happy could only be an indication of a personal
failing. There was no fallback position: As a modern American, I could not
blame fate or God or anybody else. I was the one solely responsible for my
fate.
Fromm thought that
such ultra-individualistic freedom lead not only to stress and anxiety but to
alienation and serious mental illness. He did not think this was a private
problem where individuals had become “unadjusted;” he thought it was a public
issue, a “pathology of contemporary Western society.”1
I was reminded
of these ideas recently while perusing a new book by Liah Greenfield, Mind,
Modernity, Madness. Like Fromm, Greenfeld claims that increasing mental
illness is the price paid by the developed world for replacing communities
knitted together by traditions with nation-states organized by the liberal
values of equality, liberty, and declining religious authority.
If this is so, I wondered, what relevance does this have to the recent
upsurge of unstable individuals committing mass violence. The pertinent
question becomes: If democratic nationalism breeds mental illness, is there a
causal connection between this rising psychopathology and the recent increase
in mass violence?
The NYT recently made such a connection, in a piece entitled “In the Age of ISIS, Who’s a Terrorist, and Who’s
Simply Deranged?” Terrorism experts agree that the Islamic State has “a
broad appeal to the mentally unbalanced, the displaced and others on the
fringes of society.”
One can certainly make the case that the causal factor in much of our
recent violence is mental illness, not terrorism. In many recent cases of mass killing, the
deranged perpetrator converted to a terrorist ideology only in the last weeks
of his life, or last days, or in one instance, the last minutes before he was
killed.
From a mental health professional viewpoint, the sequence of events
leading to violence likely is as follows: an unstable individual sits and
stews, isolating himself from others,
ruminating about his perceived failings, churning with inchoate rage she don’t
understand and can’t verbalize. Over time–if left untreated– his rumination can
turn to delusions. Losing touch with reality, he projects his repressed rage
and unacceptable feelings of aggression onto some outside entity–a person,
group, or country, who he comes to identify as the devil incarnate. Finally, after dehumanizing this “enemy,” he
takes action, believing no type of brutality against such evil could be too
extreme.
To Liah Greenfield, this does not bode well for our future. She believes
that madness bred of nationalism will become a mobilizing force, “creating a
politics of sheer ideology and shaping a destructive form of political action”,3 more tribal than productive.
So far, her dismal prediction appears to be coming true with the rise of
increasingly aggressive and xenophobic strains of nationalism around the world
– including, unfortunately, right here in the United States, as personalized by
the rise of Donald Trump.
What can be done?
One thing is clear: It is counterproductive to arm every citizen to the
teeth or mount military campaigns against other countries or whole religions as
a response to such deranged, lone-wolf attacks. While less dramatic, and thus
unappealing to politicians, it would be far more cost efficient and effective
to provide quality and affordable mental health services to all our citizens,
as well as to people around the world.
While that would be a significant improvement, it would still only be a
band-aid treating the symptoms.
When it comes to treating the cause, it is Fromm, not Greenfield, who
prescribes real medicine to treat this spreading “pathology” of contemporary
life. His diagnosis extends beyond a critique of nationalism to blame unbridled
capitalism for uprooting community, putting profits over people, and corrupting
politicians, resulting in increasing disparity between rich and poor –all of
which accelerate economic insecurity and psychological suffering.
Fromm knew we could never turn back the hands of time: Modern democratic
nationalism is here to stay, but he believed the correct treatment could do
much to ameliorate the human suffering it causes.
Eric Fromm’s medicine of choice was democratic socialism. Maybe it’s time
to give it a try. Bernie Sanders certainly thinks so.
xxx
––––––––––––––––––––––––––
1 The
Sane Society by Eric Fromm, page 6
2 New
York Times, 7/18/16
3 American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 119, No. 5 (March
2014), pp. 1527-1528
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