Forks in the road. It appears Western society is taking the wrong one.
I started this one shortly after the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, but I'd contemplated it before that. I've never really abandoned the thread, but as I track things of a century ago and I actually spend very little time blogging (darned near everything written here has been written before 8:00 a.m.), I just haven't gotten back around to it.
I got back to it, however, because the other morning I saw two Internet headlines that grabbed my eye.
The first one was a headline which noted that Americans are dying of suicide and alcoholism at all time record highs.
U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began
Alcoholism, if that's correct, would be amazing, and I'd at least somewhat question that figure as the alcoholic rates before Prohibition were stunning. But the suicide one deserves some attention, and an increasing rate of alcoholism also does.
Of course, we have to be aware that statistics are only relevant in the context of the period they address, and this one only addresses a fairly compact period of time. The USA Today article noted:
The number of deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide in 2017 hit the highest level since federal data collection started in 1999, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by two public health nonprofits.
The national rate for deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide rose from 43.9 to 46.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017, a 6 percent increase, the Trust for America's Health and the Well Being Trust reported Tuesday. That was a slower increase than in the previous two years, but it was greater than the 4 percent average annual increase since 1999.
Deaths from suicides rose from 13.9 to 14.5 deaths per 100,000, a 4 percent increase. That was double the average annual pace over the previous decade.
The other headline was one from the excellent magazine The Atlantic which stated:
Workism Is Making Americans Miserable
Yep. The Boomer affliction on American society.
Houston Texas, the very model of a modern American city. It seems we're not really meant to live like this.
The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.Anyhow, starting up where I last left off, I work in a profession in which there has been, over the past decade, an increasing awareness that its conditions are really messed up and something needs to be done. In fact, during the lapse of time from which I first started this thread and my current writing there's been at least two soul searching articles in our local bar journal about lawyer mental health, and one of them specifically references a lawyer suicide.
Not that something is effectively being done. Indeed, based on my casual observations, the conditions in which we work. . . i.e., lawyers that is, is worse now than it was ten years ago. Not that the profession has been idle either. Wyoming, like most states, maybe all states, has started a lawyer assistance program for those who are in distress. As part of this, in recent months, they've ran articles in The Wyoming Lawyer from lawyers who have been in crisis, which is a good thing for the bar and brave on the part of the lawyers.
There's an intrinsic problem with all of this, however, in that the profession around the country has gone from "problem, what problem?", to the concept that the approach to the problem is to run a self reporting field hospital. The solution, we've decided, is to have people who are in trouble come ask for help, and then patch them up and send them back into the legal battlefield.
Now, I've posted on this before, and that's not really my point in posting here. I'm going to do a broader topic this time. But I'm starting with the old one. What if the problem isn't that people have become wounded under the strain, but the profession is so broken that it's eating its own?
Indeed, as a minor example of this, I received Saturday evening an cheery post from an opposing lawyer sending me discovery that was noted as not served under some weird pretext. Sending it out then, even with a cheery message, is an example of either being a real jerk or that the sender is working late on a Saturday at a soulless task. I'm pretty certain the Bar Field Hospitals don't take something on like that with "why are you making yourself into a jerk and the profession worse?"
To carry on, however, as I've now modified what I'm addressing, what if not only that is the problem, but if there's an even wider problem, and that problem is an existential one in Western society as a whole?
Indeed, as a minor example of this, I received Saturday evening an cheery post from an opposing lawyer sending me discovery that was noted as not served under some weird pretext. Sending it out then, even with a cheery message, is an example of either being a real jerk or that the sender is working late on a Saturday at a soulless task. I'm pretty certain the Bar Field Hospitals don't take something on like that with "why are you making yourself into a jerk and the profession worse?"
To carry on, however, as I've now modified what I'm addressing, what if not only that is the problem, but if there's an even wider problem, and that problem is an existential one in Western society as a whole?
Now, I'm not casting stones at these efforts such as noted above. I'm glad they've arrived. But here I'll go one step further. Indeed, I have on various occasions already, but as the news is full of the discussions on Katherine Spade and Anthony Bourdain, perhaps it's time to accept something even larger and more disturbing. Indeed, I touched on that more then once on this blog (and when I first started this post, referenced something posted "yesterday", which I no longer know what it was).
Modern society, or whatever we like to call it (the hip and cool like to call it post modern, even though nothing can be "post modern") is powerfully screwed up.* That's what's needs to be fixed. It's open and partially obvious, although it frankly is not fully obvious to those living in it today, who are highly acclimated and numbed to its decayed state. This seems to be becoming more and more obvious to some people, but only in part, and by and large the current trend is to amplify the ways in which our society is messed up to make it even more messed up.
A lot of what needs to be fixed in that is what was broken by "progress" and the "progressives". Indeed, progressives are busy breaking it even more, in the idea that once you have the patient in a coma on the floor due to the misapplication of the medicine you gave him, the solution is to give him more of the same. And then part of what needs to be fixed dates back to the commencement of the onset of the current progressive way of thinking but reflects it back in a mirror darkly, in the form of a culture and society that went from counter culture to consumer culture in its primary focus seemingly in a blink of an eye in the same generation.
A lot of what needs to be fixed in that is what was broken by "progress" and the "progressives". Indeed, progressives are busy breaking it even more, in the idea that once you have the patient in a coma on the floor due to the misapplication of the medicine you gave him, the solution is to give him more of the same. And then part of what needs to be fixed dates back to the commencement of the onset of the current progressive way of thinking but reflects it back in a mirror darkly, in the form of a culture and society that went from counter culture to consumer culture in its primary focus seemingly in a blink of an eye in the same generation.
Now, let me first state a disclaimer before proceeding. I don't know either of these people personally and I'd never even heard of Katherine Spade before she hit the news due to her death. And the death of Anthony Bourdain somewhat surprised me as his public personal simply didn't give us any clues, it seems to me, that he might be in despair.
But let's put this all in context.
There's a seeming epidemic of suicide in the Western World. In at least one area of the East, Japan, suicide has been at blistering levels for decades.
This is not true, however, of all societies everywhere. Most specifically, it isn't true of those areas of the world that remain more rural than the West, and frankly more agrarian, and more authentically religious. And by religious, I mean in the real sense, not the vague meaningless "spiritual but not religious" sense that Western "moderns" sometimes profess or in the Western Hollywood Buddhist sense.**
Our species has been around for a really long time. It'll turn out, I'm confident, that as a species we've been around a lot longer than we now believe we were. But we have only lived the way most of us do now for a very, very, brief time. For almost our entire history as a species we were nomadic. Following that, we were agrarians for a long time. We've become what we are not, urbanized, only very briefly and we've become urbanized in our current massive way only very, very recently.
Well so what, you may ask. Haven't sociologist determined that agrarian life was miserable and people moved to the cities to be super happy?
No, well not any more anyhow.
There was at one time a running line of sociological thought, propaganda really, that basically ran just that way. But more recent research has determined that nomadic people today, who are admittedly very few in number, are the happiest people on earth hands down. Next to them, people who are basically agrarian in nature fit that category. The least happy people on Earth are those who live in highly urbanized societies. And as we now know Western suicide is beginning to become a plague, meaning we're joining the highly urbanized Japanese in that tragic classification.
Why would that be?
It really doesn't require all that much thought. But we won't think about it as it runs entirely contrary to the concept of "progress" and the intellectual dictatorship of progressivism we are now in.
We're a really smart animal, but an animal none the less, and we were evolved to live out in the wilds. That's where, it truly turns out, we are the happiest. In our native state we hunted and gathered, which more accurately means we hunted, gathered and existed in subsistence nomadic agriculture. We at some point evolved the latter into a more fixed form, but often missed in that is that early agriculture was an adjustment of the existing pattern, not an abolishment of it. In hunter gatherer societies, the men principally engaged in hunting and the women in gathering and both in some farming, quite often. In agrarian societies, even fairly modern ones, the men engaged in the farming, the women supported the farming, but the men were almost always still hunters. If you look at a society that was agrarian fairly recently, such as Finland or Norway, you'll find that hunting and fishing is always common. Even in Ireland, which was agrarian to a large extent up until the Celtic Tiger changed that and began to change Ireland to its ultimate misery, that was more true than we might suppose, with fishing, bird hunting and small game hunting common in a land that was otherwise obsessed with depriving the population of the means of rebelling in the same fashion which it had only recently against the English.
What are the features of such a life?
Close connection to nature is one thing. Nature for such populations is everyday and immediate, not something that they encounter, probably in a sanitized form, on vacation somewhere. Not the safe nature that people who pay to ride on a zip line in Costa Rica encounter either.
Archangel Russia, 1919. Even in that then modern city, transportation and life was closer to nature, as it was in much of the world. Indeed, as it was in all the world compared to now. We can't put happy faces on what was tense, this was a Russia in the midst of civil war. But several elements here of what made for a happier life for many people than offered today are symbolized by this photo, including outdoor occupations, a life close to animals in their real, not "comfort animal" sense, and a church.
With that a profound sense of religion is another. Among such populations an immediate sense of the divine is always present. American Indian populations prior to 1900, Quebecois prior to their urbanization, the Irish prior to the Celtic Tiger, and Scandinavians before wealth, all had the sense of the immediate divine as evidenced by nature. It was the direct encounter with the divine that did that, not a remote metaphysical debate on it, no matter how metaphysical the definitions in the same societies were.
Shrine of St. Anne de Beapre in Quebec in the 1940s. At this time Quebec was more rural, more isolated, highly agrarian, deeply religious, and by all measured accounts, much happier than it is today.
That sense of the divine, moreover, was one in which it was acknowledged that the divine was just that, not man was divine. There was no concept that God operated on democratic principals, but rather that man had to conform his being to God. And that went back to what we've just noted about nature. A Natural Law was conceived of as having been the creation of God which in turn had determined man's nature. People could and did act contrary to that nature, but that man had a right to do so was not a concept nor was there any concept that men could vote to change their natures or impose a change of view on the part of God.
And immediate purpose was another. Even now people who work in agriculture have an immediate purpose. People who subsistence hunt do as well. Knowing what you are doing and why that matters is common among all of these people.
And, and interestingly, among the less developed societies, leisure is common. Hunting and gathering societies hardly work at all, by the modern context. Agrarian ones certainly do, and did, but not to the same extent as we do today.
Indeed, in spite of urbanization being a long running trend in the West, and for that matter the East, where agrarian and agricultural pursuits remained strong near the cities much of this continued to be true well into the 20th Century. Small towns were full of people who in addition to their work day labors engaged in much of what we noted above. Indeed, usually all of it, or nearly so.
Now we've replaced that with an antiseptic world in which live surrounded by glass, concrete and steel and inject nature only in a very safe and often completely false fashion. As we've done that, in our despair, we've waged war on nature it self in the form of our natural selves. We have developed false diets as we've become unable to handle the fact of death in the bizarre belief that the more extreme and unnatural the diet the more likely we will be to live forever. As we've developed surplus income and have nothing worthwhile to do with it, we've become obsessed with doing whatever we want, particularly in regards to sex, which, through the introduction of pharmaceuticals, we've been able to defeat the nature of. As we've done that, we've become confused about the very nature of sex and have elevated an aspect of it to define our characters, particularly when our desires become disordered. And our work has lost its immediate meaning. Many people work because they must, with no concept that it has any extrinsic value. Added to it all, living surrounded as we are in what amount to near mausoleums, afraid of death, and resentful of anything that might restrain our desperate efforts to distract ourselves from the meaningless nature of modern life, we've rejected the lessons of faith even when they are obvious, replacing those in many instances with watered down religions that do little but cheer and not suggest any restraint or correction, or none at all, leaving ourselves to elevate our desires to deities.
Indeed, as we've noted the suicide rate climb we've also found ourselves in an accelerated phase of this. Progressiveness took on the last legitimate enemies of equality of man a couple of decades ago. That left the radical to keep on keeping on with no real purpose or focus, so new radical ones have been advanced. We keep "progressing", but to what? We now actually define who we are by our appetites, both our dietary and our sexual ones. People are always just people, but now people insist on having their appetites accepted as their defining characteristics.
And we wonder why so many have reached despair?
Well, back to the recent news. I don't know that I can relate either of these deaths to what I've noted, but I wonder. Katherine Spade may have simply been afflicted by a mental illness and nothing more. Indeed, there's real reason to suspect that. But I will note that she was employed in an industry, the "fashion industry", which is completely pointless. I don't know that she saw it that way, and I hope she didn't, but it really is. Fashion is a human triviality. And for decades now, while I know nothing of her work at all and therefore wouldn't characterize it in this fashion (indeed she personally dressed very modestly) it has produced clothing for women that often debased them. Again, I know nothing of her work at all.
I would note that, interestingly, the other details of her life are hard to come by, which is fine as she may have simply been highly private. She was married to just one spouse her in her adult life and had one child. Her funeral was in her home town in Kansas at a Catholic church, and she was raised Catholic. That tells me little, however. Did she remain faithful to a faith that is deep in metaphysical thought or did she stray? Did she fall victim to careerism, the snake oil of modern society that the Baby Boomer generation became addicted to, with men spreading it to women in the 1970s, after that generation's fascination with drugs waned? Was one child a conscious and regretted limiting choice or a personal tragedy? There's no easy way to know. What we do know is that her business has kept on keeping on without her, which is a bit of a tragedy in and of itself. An industry that is purely consumerist in nature keeps on without its founder in a field that's of little real importance hardly without a glitch. That tells us something.
Bourdain I also don't know much about, being only familiar with him due to television where he always seemed cheerful and where he was very interesting. He was obviously very interested in people. But if you look into his life you'll find that he grew up in a home of mixed heritage in terms of religion but where he was raised with no religion at all. As a young man he embraced drugs and alcohol, things that have a lasting impact and which some never really free themselves from (indeed on his show drinking was common, and it's the case that people who have suffered from alcohol addiction are urged not to partake at all). At least in his earlier life he seems to have struggled to grope for something and perhaps that struggle never left him. Sadly, the opposite traits seemed there as well as he was clearly outgoing and dynamic and had at one time a long lasting marriage before that fell apart and he remarried twice and then engaged in a non married relationship with a third woman.
On that, he was dedicated to his daughter whom he had late in life but I wonder about this element of our society now as well. So many simply try to avoid children, if they have some money and "careers" in the thought that those things will make life one big happy party. It doesn't, so you see them come to more meaning, and often children, later. But you can't have it all and life closes doors every single day without reopening new ones. Things delayed are frankly simply passed by, as a rule.
And as time has passed since his death, it's become more and more clear that Bourdain could not avoid the call of the natural in all things, because none of us can no matter how hard we try, while at the same time Bourdain's personal life is sort of oddly emblematic in that sense.
Bourdain's first wife was his high school sweetheart and he graduated early in order to follow her from high school. They were married for about two decades which suggests that the relationship was pretty stable, but it apparently lacked something, which I suspect was a greater foundation on something else. During that twenty years they never had children. His second wife was Ottavia Busia, a Sardinian mixed martial arts fighter with whom he had one child. They were married for about a decade and had one child, whom as we noted he was very close to. Following that he had a long relationship with Asia Argento, an Italian actress many years his junior and also divorced. At least according to the Rumornet Argento and Bourdain didn't have an exclusive relationship, at least in so far as Argento was concerned.
Now, a person may wonder what that has to do with anything, but at least at some level it has the appearance of probably reflecting Bourdain's deeper desires and instincts, which he never completely yielded to. Bourdain's father was Catholic, as noted, but apparently non practicing. His mother was a non observant Jew. Bourdain claimed not to believe in anything but none the less claimed to be Jewish, which woudl be problematic from at least the Orthodox prospective as at least hte Orthodox count Judaism paternally. Anyhow, Bourdain's family was non observant and that seems fairly clearly to be the missing large piece of the puzzle of his life. His first wife was an American actress of Polish, and tehrefore Catholic, extraction. His second wife was Sardinian, which is an Italian island which has been described as "fiercely Catholic" and a culture so defined in that sense that even non observant Sardinians observe religious feasts and festivals. His third wife likewise was Italian, which is a culture which has been so defined by Catholicism that it has been joked that even Italian communists, and at one time the Italian Communist Party was a fairly strong party, were Catholic in their outlook and behavior. So Bourdain seems to have cast out for cultures which are reflected by observance to a larger faith, even while choosing members of those cultures which left him safe from having to commit.
Taking the focus out from the close to the larger, i.e, reducing our telephoto lens, what we have is that the entire West right now is really in denial about nature in every sense and has, instead, focused on the superficial. People have removed themselves from nature to glass and steel, even though they hate it. In order to compensate for that they have adopted a false plastic nature which doesn't reflect the real, and often bloody, one. As they've done that they've become hugely self indulgent focused on material acquisition and self indulgent sex removed from the nature of sex. Lately that's even expanded to self alteration in a hyper self focused way in which its imagined that temporary self reflection should be reflected in surgery to alter a person's very self and reinforced with pharmaceuticals to obtain a fake, non natural, reality. Capping it all off people have abandoned real faiths, which require a person to acknowledge the external and large and primary, for false self created individual ones that allow them to at least concede a "spiritual" while denying that the spiritual may in fact make demands on the individual.
There's no way that people can be happy in that condition.
If all of this is bleak on a larger scale, none of this has to be this way, either for society at large or for anyone individual. People who are in despair should seek help. Lifestyles that create despair need not be engaged in. Indeed, the entire concept of a "lifestyle" is absurd, and people should instead seek a life that's authentic. That would mean rejecting almost all of the popular concept of life in the Western World today, but so be it. A career will not make you happy, while a calling, which might mean much less in the way of income, will assist in that. You are not the center of the universe but there is such a center. There is no real liberty in being a libertine and a libertine society produces, instead, slavery to appetites which is slavery. If people seemed more content, quite often, in the past, that's because they really were, knowing those things.
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*Modern is a word that comes to us from Latin, through French. It literally means "of or pertaining to the current time", having as its root "modo", meaning "just now". The Latin form of the word modernus was used in Roman times. The English version appears in Shakespeare. It simply means the current time. Whenever you live, you are in "modern times". Things can never be "post modern" as "post modern" is, by its very nature, the distant future that you will never live in, ever. When that time arrives, whenever you may consider it to have arrived, it will in fact be modern times.
**Save for Buddhist monks who have immigrated to the United States, there are no Buddhist in the United States. The sort of Buddhism that American Buddhist claim to profess isn't Buddhims, its a do it yourself pretend Buddhims that takes the discplined and scary parts out of Buddhism. It's a lot like modern "spiritual but not religious" in that fashion, or Christianity Lite that a lot of American Christians sort of profess.
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