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Is the modern world a spiritual hellhole?

Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp has a piece today headlined "The 6 thinkers who would define a second Trump term." The gist is that the people surrounding Trump would no longer be establishment figures who try to rein him in, but true believers who will egg him on. And those true believers are all being influenced by the six intellectuals on Beauchamp's list.

I dunno. Maybe. You can read it and decide for yourself—though I'm especially skeptical that Curtis Yarvin has any true influence. But maybe I'm out of touch.

In any case, one of the six is Patrick Deneen, and for some reason this paragraph provoked me:

Deneen’s first big book, Why Liberalism Failed, argued that the shared philosophy of the American center — a liberalism focused on rights and individual freedom — had produced a miserable world. While claiming to liberate people to pursue their own life plan, liberalism in fact cut them off from traditional sources of community and stability. Americans were depressed, lonely, and immiserated — and they had their governing consensus to blame.

Maybe "provoked" is the wrong word. It's just that this critique is so common and so banal. Deneen focuses on the right-wing version: we need more religion, more local control of politics, and less centralized bureaucracy. Robert Putnam gave us the centrist version in Bowling Alone, which argues that social interaction and civic engagement have declined over the past few decades. And then there's the traditional lefty version, which focuses on the destructive influence of late capitalism and consumerism at the expense of what really matters in life. It's all the same thing. No less a lefty than Barack Obama recommended Deneen's best known book.

In other words, this idea that there's a spiritual hole in our lives has been a loud and persistent critique of modernism since at least World War II. Examples abound. The "rat race." Future Shock. Downshifting. The Whole Earth Catalog. Naomi Klein. God and Man at Yale. Social media panics. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

And maybe the modern world does leave a hole in our lives. Or maybe not. The World Happiness Report, which admittedly should be taken with a grain of salt, provides this list of the happiest and unhappiest places:

(The United States ranks 23rd out of 143 with a score of 6.73.) You will immediately notice something obvious. Generally speaking, the happiest countries are all rich, nonreligious, bureaucratic, peaceful, consumerist, well educated, and high tech. The unhappiest places are generally poor, traditional, badly educated, violent, corrupt, low-tech, and full of strong family bonds.

Now, happy is not the same thing as fulfilled, but this is still a helluva comparison. I suspect that our obsession with purpose and fulfillment is mostly possible only because we're rich and comfortable. People in those bottom ten countries don't have the time or energy to even think about it. They just want to make it to the next day, and religion and family bonds don't really do much to lighten their misery.

Beyond this, even if the hole is a genuine problem I keep wondering what people think we ought to do about it. On an individual level, sure, there are things that can help: therapy, self-help, meditation, religion, etc. But on a societal level? We're just not going back to the 19th century. Technological progress has boomed over the past century, so we're going to have lots of technology. Technology means complexity, so we're going to have big centralized bureaucracies to manage it. Big, complex bureaucracies require high levels of education, and education is pretty highly correlated with the decline of religious belief. Finally, we plainly prefer being rich to being poor, so we're going to have big corporations and a consumerist culture.

This is all way, way too big to be turned around by mere government policy. It just is. So while we can gripe about this stuff all we want, there's not a single person on earth who has any concrete idea what to do about it. Our only solution is better adaptation, not wholesale cultural revolution.

POSTSCRIPT: As a side note, it's especially nuts to think Donald Trump is going to do anything about this. He's rich, educated, nonreligious, in love with technology, runs a huge corporation, and couldn't care less about social bonds. If there's a single person on the planet who embodies the alleged hole in our souls, it's Donald Trump.

53 thoughts on “Is the modern world a spiritual hellhole?

      1. lower-case

        i believe on the average they're pretty unhappy

        coal jobs went from ~110,000 in the 1940's to 20,000 today and the people left behind blame the democrats for the loss of the coal industry (even though cheap natural gas is just about as much to blame as anything the epa has done)

        a lot of them don't want to leave their families to pursue jobs elsewhere, some are afraid of 'urban dwellers' of any variety, and many just don't have enough cash in the bank to pull up roots even if they wanted to

        another aspect i don't see mentioned much is when you're living in an area where the average income is scraping the poverty line, working stiffs tend to resent the sizeable number of folks receiving gov't support

        and in small isolated communities everyone knows (or is related to) people on the dole and likely feel that many of them are undeserving

        toss in a fair number of teenage pregnancies, high divorce rates, drug/alcohol problems, etc., and it should be no surprise a lot of people are unhappy

    1. jeffreycmcmahon

      This one would seem to be correlated with education levels, which is really what we should be pursuing. Nobody can really define 'happiness' but educated people are better-equipped at figuring it out for themselves, which you'd think would be a conservative priority, but then we don't really have a 'conservative' party in this country (we have a fascist reactionary party and a big tent party that ranges from socialist to conservative).

    2. skeptonomist

      Once again, MAGAs are unhappy and hostile because they're losing the dominance of the White Christian tribe. Such people are most common in the former Confederate states. For them, this is disintegration of society, and once they have that attitude they can believe anything bad about the liberals who have been the cause of the weakening of White Christian Supremacy.

      But questions like this should be disaggregated by race. It's not likely that Whites and Blacks in Mississippi have the same response to many questions.

    1. aldoushickman

      "It is a small family business that just has extraordinarily valuable assets" according to Trump.

      Such as Mar-a-Lago, the swamp mansion Trump claims is worth $1.5 billion, but which the tax assessor assesses at $37 million.

    2. ProgressOne

      According to PrivCo, the Trump Organization has 22,450 employees and brings in $9.5 billion in annual revenue. A “large” corporation starts at $1 billion in annual revenue. So The Trump Organization is a large business.

      1. Jasper_in_Boston

        ...the Trump Organization has 22,450 employees and brings in $9.5 billion in annual revenue.

        If by $9.5 billion you mean $600 million, sure. That figure you cite might (might!) be a plausible guesstimate for the various enterprises that pay Trump to use his name on casinos or resorts or vodka. But there is no way the Trump Organization itself is a ten billion dollar firm.

        Source: https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/21-unusual-facts-about-billionaire-politician-donald-trump.html

  1. gVOR08

    "Beyond this, even if the hole is a genuine problem I keep wondering what people think we ought to do about it." That. So little of what conservatives worry about seems like legitimate political issues. OK, abortion has been a matter of law, and until recently so was LGBT activity. Immigration is a matter of law. But church attendance? Membership in bowling leagues? Childless cat ladies teaching school? Imaginary CRT in grade school? Deneen's ties to family and community?

  2. Josef

    "The six thinkers..." I'm not sure thinkers is the right word to use in reference to anyone associated with Trumps second term. Sociopaths, psychopaths and idiots maybe, thinkers not so much.

    1. bethby30

      Kevin is wrong about Curtis Yarvin. He has had a big effect on the thinking of JD Vance and his owner Peter Thiel:

      “Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
      Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator’s benefactor. But they’re both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society.”

      https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas

      1. Justin

        Not sure what you mean… my support for democrats is going to cost me in the long run? I don’t think so. I don’t look to politics for happiness. Nor do I have this spiritual void.

  3. akapneogy

    "If there's a single person on the planet who embodies the alleged hole in our souls, it's Donald Trump."

    Buddhists have recognized the 'hole', 'sunyata' in Sanskrit or Pali, for more than 2500 years now. It is how you fill that hole that distinguishes a 'bhikkhu' from Trump.

  4. SnowballsChanceinHell

    Good lord. Where to start?

    "Generally speaking, the happiest countries are all rich, nonreligious, bureaucratic, peaceful, consumerist, well educated, and high tech. The unhappiest places are generally poor, traditional, badly educated, violent, corrupt, low-tech, and full of strong family bonds."

    Why attribute the happiness to anything other than wealth and peace? Conversely why attribute the unhappiness to anything other that violence and poverty? Why are "strong family bonds" lumped together with corruption and violence?

    There is a bizarre conservativism at play here: having achieved what he considers the perfect atomized, secular, individualistic, impersonal, market-based society, Kevin wants to foreclose any investigation into whether that society could be improved.

    1. Anandakos

      Um, you certainly give Kevin an extraordinary level of responsibility for the world today:

      having achieved what he considers the perfect atomized, secular, individualistic, impersonal, market-based society, Kevin...

      And here I thought those things were FDR's fault.

  5. ruralhobo

    A spiritual hellhole the world is not, or else it always was, but an epistemic crisis there certainly is. Per Foucault, the previous one was the Enlightenment, but then Church doctrine was replaced by something else to guide thought, Reason. If we distrust the latter, thus also science, and many people are doing that, what takes its place? In politics, memes and vibes, it would seem. What will the October surprise be? A single Mexican accused of rape would help Trump win. He doesn't even have to be guilty if the victim is white and the shouting is loud. I remember Willie Horton but today is much more volatile than then. These are very bad times.

    As for happiness indexes, harumph. In comfortable countries people are ashamed to say they're unhappy, since it would be their own failing, so they don't. In poor countries they can blame government or something else, justly so, so they'll be more honest.

  6. Joel

    My guess is that a significant amount of the unhappiness in industrialized societies comes from financial inequality. IOW, people at the bottom coveting their neighbor's goods (see, e.g., Commandments, The Ten). Probably not because they miss religion.

    1. Anandakos

      Donald Trump covets his neighbor's ass AND her maidservant, and he's got more money than God [Acording to Trump]. So it's not poverty that's the driver for this unbridled selfishness.

      I just drove from Central Michigan through Ohio, central Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut. I went right down Swing State Alley.

      The ONLY "deprivation" I saw was when the Google Assistant routed us up Hill Street in Pittsburgh, through the 'Hood. The folks along Hill Street are voting for Dems, because they know the Segs are quite comfortable in "Today's Republican Party!"

      After all, Capitalism is all about owning "things", right? While it's true that "people" are sometimes contrasted to "things" -- "people and things" is a common phrase -- they are in fact a subset of "things". So the modern tech-bro mind can "see the wisdom" in owning a few, if only as cocktail party icebreakers.

      "What's wrong with owning some people?" can start some stimulating colloquies.

  7. Creigh Gordon

    'While claiming to liberate people to pursue their own life plan, liberalism in fact cut them off from traditional sources of community and stability"

    I blame television.

    1. Scott_F

      Whenever Jonathan Haidt rails against cellphones I think of all the dire prdictions made bout the generation raised by the Idiot Box.

      It's funny how every time some so-called Thinker demands a solution to the "problem with youth today", the answer is always to impose that Thinker's childhood experience on the world. How soon GenX has mythologized our Bad News Bears upbringing

  8. Joel

    'While claiming to liberate people to pursue their own life plan, liberalism in fact cut them off from traditional sources of community and stability"

    Tribalism and religion have historically been the source of divisiveness and instability. To the extent that it's been implemented, liberalism has proven an antidote.

  9. Austin

    “While claiming to liberate people to pursue their own life plan, liberalism in fact cut them off from traditional sources of community and stability.”

    Deneen: tell me you’re straight cisgender without telling me you’re straight cisgender. Cause LGBT folk have almost never (until maybe the last 10-20 years thanks to liberalism) been able to find community or stability from “traditional sources.” They historically have been thrown away, repressed, beaten, mentally and physically tortured, raped and/or killed by their families, towns and nations in which they were born and raised. (They still are today in places run by Republicans and/or religious fanatics.) Their only chance for survival often was to get the hell away “traditional sources” and make their own communities.

  10. emjayay

    Maybe sunlight most of the time for half the year and then darkness most of the time for the rest is an important factor. Also parkas.

  11. Yikes

    The report is the most Captain Obvious one of all time. Click on the link and you get a map. Guess what? All of the first world (rich) countries are happy.

    Guess what else? All of the third world countries are bringing up the rear.

    The fact that compact, wealthy countries with the best social safety nets are the happiest is so obvious. What, its like Republicans expect them to be miserable because SOCIALISM! or is the basic truth that parts of the US illustrate the flaws of capitalism?

    Ugh.

  12. Martin Stett

    "In other words, this idea that there's a spiritual hole in our lives has been a loud and persistent critique of modernism since at least World War II. Examples abound."

    See also Sinclair Lewis's Midwestern oeuvre, or Theodore Dreiser's.

  13. pjcamp1905

    Trump has 6 thinkers? Color me dubious.

    Also any problem that require religion to fix it is a priori bullshit. There has been no more destructive force in human history than religion.

  14. lawnorder

    One of the things that Marx got right was "religion is the opium of the people". When your life offers few opportunities for earthly pleasures, you tend to reach for the pain killer of religion. One might hypothesize that right-wing American Christians are aware of this, and oppose social programs that tend to reduce misery because when misery is reduced religiosity is also reduced. IOW they would rather that people continue to be miserable than see reduced support for their churches.

    Because of the weakness of the American social safety net, the US has an exceptionally high amount of misery for a rich country. This may explain why the US has an exceptionally high amount of religiosity for a rich country.

    1. SnowballsChanceinHell

      "When your life offers few opportunities for earthly pleasures, you tend to reach for the pain killer of religion."

      And modernity offers the overwhelming majority of individuals little in the way of self-actualization. You are an insignificant cog in a giant machine. Your individual efforts are amateurish and meaningless. Your fate is determined by vast, impersonal forces beyond your control, prediction, or understanding. As Kevin enthusiastically points out at every opportunity, you are a soulless meat puppet that merely maps stimuli to response. You will die and be forgotten.

      We give opioids to those suffering incurable physical pain. And yet we attack any attempt to give life some meaning?

      1. lawnorder

        I'm not certain what "self-actualization" means, but I'm pretty sure that the life of the average peasant in pre-industrial times, who was born on a farm, worked on the farm all his life, and died at the age of 40 without ever having been more than five miles from that farm, didn't offer much self-actualization either. Being an insignificant cog is not just a modern problem.

        1. SnowballsChanceinHell

          "I'm not certain what 'self-actualization' means"

          Well, thankfully, you can just look it up.

          "However, at least three studies suggested that traditional societies have relatively high levels of well-being. Evidence from the field studies suggests that Inuit, Maasai or Amish report generally high levels of happiness and life satisfaction (Biswas-Diener et al., 2005), with the most traditional Massai group showing the highest levels of general life satisfaction. Also, Himba – remote herding people of north-west Namibia inhabiting rural areas – had significantly higher levels of life satisfaction compared to the urban Himba living in towns; moreover, both Himba populations had significantly higher life satisfaction than the sample of United Kingdom adults (Martin and Cooper, 2017). Additionally, studies among Tsimane Amerindian from Amazonia suggest that, for a society in the early stages of integration to the market economy, consumption of market goods is not associated with frequency of smiles (Masferrer-Dodas et al., 2012). Altogether, these results suggest that modernization of traditional societies does not have a direct, straightforward impact on people’s happiness (see also Godoy et al., 2009, 2010), and one could also argue that modernization may even be associated with certain disadvantages."

          While these results might be a bummer for the (W)estern (E)ducated (I)ndustrialized (R)ich and (D)emocratic among us, they do suggest that perhaps some of our problems can be addressed through strengthening social ties.

          1. KenSchulz

            Why didn’t the urban Himba go back to the herds, where they were happier? And why aren’t millions of Americans living in hippie communes? There were lots of those when I was young, they mostly ceased to be. Maybe you can’t go back …

            1. SnowballsChanceinHell

              Introducing people to alternatives can destroy their contentment with what they have, without making them any happy with the alternative. Consider teenage girls and social media.

  15. Bluto_Blutarski

    Whatever it is that makes Afghanistan the unhappiest country in the world, I am going to go out on a limb and say it is NOT an absence of spirituality or a surfeit of secularity.

  16. Jim Carey

    Kevin, your statement, that "there's not a single person on earth who has any concrete idea what to do about it," is a testable hypothesis. Let me guess. You'll reflexively dismiss any suggestion that you might be wrong because it's always so much easier (in the short term) to just assume that you're right.

    Religion, the word, comes from the Latin words for redo and ligament, aka a binding. A religious practice deliberately restrengthens the bonds that hold our social system together because they (social bonds) will otherwise weaken. Rust never sleeps. Ergo, if what was a religious practice starts dividing in lieu of uniting, then it is no longer a religious practice and is instead a fundamentalist ideology.

    So, what does a religious practice do? It resolves within-system conflicts, aka dilemmas. Often, the dilemma is within ourselves, hence the need for a contemplative practice. A dilemma is otherwise between individuals and/or groups.

    Every religious practice is a context-specific expression of the moral "treat others the way you would want to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot" principle. Every fundamentalist ideology is a context-specific expression of the immoral "do unto others before they do unto you" principle.

    The phrase "moral (fill in the blank)" is redundant, and the phrase "immoral (fill in the blank)" is an oxymoron where "fill in the blank" includes Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, politician, scientist, capitalist, judge, lawyer, etc. And we need a word to describe immoral people. Seems to me "hypocrite" will do just fine.

    It's worth noting that knowledge is not belief, and vice versa. For example, knowing that a red light means stop is not the same as stopping when the light turns red.

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